Studies on Faulkner's Novels from a Cultural Anthropological Perspective

reading Faulkner as a modernist writer, approaching from aesthetic planes and comprehensively examining works and materials beyond the novel such as short stories, letters, plays, interviews. In the context of finding “new research directions in Faulkner studies” (the name of the conference theme), Ostendorf proposes that Faulkner had the methods, concerns and goals of an anthropologist, and that anthropological knowledge will help to better understand his literary achievements [51]. Within the scope of the material covered, we envision that this work contributes to laying the foundation and suggesting comprehensive anthropological approaches to the Faulkner legacy.

Among the practices that apply specific anthropological categories to reading Faulkner's novels, the contributions of Christopher A. LaLonde, Irene Visser, and Charles Hannon can be mentioned. LaLonde and Visser apply the theory of rites of passage of the Belgian anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep in their two works William Faulkner and the Rites of Passage (1996) [52] and Willingness to Die: Rites of Passage in the Novels of William Faulkner (2012) [53]. In his French work Les Rites de Passage (The Rites of Passage, 1909), Gennep studies the rites that mark the transition of the individual throughout the life cycle and the transition from one state to another, such as birth, puberty, marriage, ordination, or death [54]. Among them, death rituals are analyzed in depth in Visser's article. Examining the funeral procession of Mrs. Addie in As I Lay Dying , the day Quentin committed suicide in The Sound and the Fury , and Joe's murder in August Sun , Visser asserts that "Faulkner dramatizes the rites of passage of death in these important works not only as expressions of traditional culture and hierarchical structures in society, but perhaps more importantly, while evoking a mythical biosphere that transcends cultural fantasies, they also reveal the injustices in contemporary society" [53,469]. The thesis can learn from the two works of LaLonde and Visser the in-depth analysis in As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, August Sun , and at the same time, find suggestions for applying knowledge of ritual to reading Faulkner.

In the chapter Ethnographic Allegory and the Hamlet in Faulkner and Cultural Discourses (2005), Hannon practices reading Faulkner’s Hamlet by exploiting “ethnographic allegory” – a term proposed by anthropologist James Clifford. According to Clifford, anthropological practices, which are considered non-fictional texts, but when describing culture, like fictional works, they always evoke various allegories [55,104-105]. Reading Faulkner from anthropology, according to Hannon, “offers the opportunity to observe the relationship between

subjectivity in Faulkner's texts and historical discontinuities in cultural discourses” [55,105]. From here, Hannon interprets two types of voices in Faulkner's writing: subjective narratives and objective descriptions. “The writer's experimentation with literary discursive traditions (such as pastoral, romantic, and various forms of modern irony) throughout his career, and especially in The Hamlet , represents a moment of transition in modern cultural discourses that are crossing the boundaries of literary history. They are indicators, and are also influenced by experiences of voice that appear in other modernist discourses, such as historiography, law, labor, and—as I [Hannon] will discuss here—anthropological discourse” [55,107]. Hannon’s work offers the reader an anthropological reading of Faulkner’s Hamlet and, at the same time, provides anthropological materials on early twentieth-century America.

Although the history of Faulkner research from anthropology around the world has had rich achievements, and certainly beyond the scope of the thesis's material coverage, if placed in relation to the research trends on Faulkner, anthropology is often not mentioned as an independent trend. The most massive and elaborate work to date, Handbook on William Faulkner Research edited by Charles A. Peek and Robert W. Hamblin, synthesizes 13 research trends on Faulkner, none of which is named anthropology. Chapter 7 of the book is a research direction close to anthropology - Cultural Studies Criticism. Even here, the author also states that "although there is no independent work to exemplify the cultural research approach on Faulkner, there have been many anthologies or magazine topics applying the cultural research approach to his works" [9,170]. Similar to cultural studies, anthropological approaches, with their comprehensive and interdisciplinary perspectives, can be found, to varying degrees, in a wide spectrum of related studies. Therefore, the following section focuses on studies of Faulkner's novels that intersect with and approach anthropology. In fact, works that raise questions and discuss the central concepts of anthropology have appeared throughout the journey of criticizing Faulkner's novels from the beginning until today. Among the vast array of interdisciplinary studies, we have selected a brief outline of works that have a direct or close approach to the specific tasks that will be addressed in the thesis.

The issue of Faulkner and the American South has been interpreted from many perspectives, in which historical criticism and cultural criticism are the two main approaches. Faulkner's Southern imprint was affirmed right from the beginning of the Swedish Academy's Citation for Faulkner [56,440]. The historical approach to Faulkner appeared

appeared quite early. The consciousness of reading Faulkner in the Southern context was proposed by O'Donnell, who argued that "the most important principle of Faulkner's literature is the Southern social-economic-moral tradition" [according to 9,32]. Following O'Donnell, a series of scholars conducted elaborate studies of Faulkner from a historical perspective. DH Doyle spent 20 years writing Faulkner's Grain: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha (2001) [57]. In particular, Faulkner was also discussed in a fierce and provocative work: The Lost Cause Myth and Civil War History (Alan T. Nolan & Gary W. Gallagher, eds., 2010). In this work, nine historians openly declared war on the Lost Cause phenomenon, they exposed and criticized the way people distorted the history of the Civil War and created dangerous myths. Margaret Mitchell, for example, with Gone with the Wind, was considered “a wonderful story but a bad history, a manifesto of the Lost Cause nature” because of its fabrications about slavery, Yankees, the Confederate army, lynch mobs, and Reconstruction. Unlike Mitchell, Faulkner is mentioned as a writer who humorously and painfully parodied the Lost Cause. The above studies have in common the effort to find the connection between Southern history and Faulknerian literature to explain Faulkner’s conception of his homeland. Thanks to that, not only the anthropological approach, but almost all studies of Faulkner from many different directions are indebted to these historical criticisms.

Appearing later, cultural criticism of Faulkner moved closer to anthropological categories and the category of community identity. The works of Clean Brooks were early studies that focused on the issue of Southern culture in Faulkner's novels. Two representative books, William Faulkner: The World of Yoknapatawpha (1963) and William Faulkner: The Shore of Yoknapatawpha (1978) both asserted that one of the central aspects of Faulkner's vision was "community". In particular, the book The Burden of Southern History (first published in 1960), by historian CV Woodward, moved very close to anthropology, when Southern "identity" became the core and consistent category of the book. Woodward sees the South as a special being: a child of the motherland America, but the South carries its own pains, its own past stories, its own unique identities. Studying the encroachment of industrial civilization on the post-Civil War and early 20th century South, Woodward delves into the anxiety of losing identity: “the danger of becoming ‘nothing different’, the fear of being crushed under the national bulldozer that has haunted the Southern mind for a long time” [58,8]. He appreciates the literary works of the Renaissance

The South, as the place where that heritage was incubated. He wrote, “I believe that Southern historians owe a debt to the works of art and literature of the Southern Renaissance, where the powerful creative energies of their locality blossomed” [58,xxii]. Among them, Faulkner is the writer that Woodward especially respects: “After Faulkner, Wolfe, Warren, and Welty, no educated Southerner can be indifferent to their heritage or doubt its longevity” [58,25]. Clearly, this work of Woodward is very meaningful in providing readers with a background of knowledge about the identity of the American South, at the same time, suggesting reading Faulkner in the general context of the American Southern Renaissance literature.

Around the category of humanity , one can find a huge amount of research with the keywords of race, gender, disability and evil in Faulkner's novels. On the subject of race , the classic works of Lewis M. Dabney The Yoknapatawpha Indian: A Literary and Historical Study (1974), Eric Sundquist's Faulkner: A House Divided (1983), and Thadious M. Davis ' Faulkner's Black People: Art and Southern Context (1983) laid a very important reference foundation on the issue of race in the context of Southern culture and history. The book Nationalism and the Color Line in the Writings of George W. Cable, Mark Twain and William Faulkner (Barbara Ladd, 1997) approaches the issue of race from the concept of the "color line". This study brings us to the concept of “color line” and “double consciousness” of black anthropologist WEB Du Bois, to express the conflicted state of identity of African Americans. The key “color line” continues to evoke thoughts about the phenomenon of “passing the color line” and the passing novel in literature. In this regard, Professor Dimock’s lecture at Yale University, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner (2012), is an example of close reading, when she analyzes the phenomenon of “passing the color line” in Faulkner’s novel August Sun , compares it with Nella Larsen’s Crossing the Line (1929), and interprets it in the cultural and political turmoil of the United States in the 1920s and 1930s [59]. Another notable work is Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Made Faulkner (2009) by Judith L. Sensibar. She explores the ambivalence of white Southern children when they are separated from their black nannies, a form of “double consciousness” in white men. She argues that segregation creates a “violent psychological education,” and that the harsh event is “the boy’s defining moment in the Southern man’s search for identity and masculinity” [60,21]. The book

provides useful references for perceiving the impact of cultural patterns, evoking us to reflect on the “double consciousness” within the writer himself.

Research on gender in Faulkner's novels is quite diverse and inconsistent in viewpoints, including two prominent issues that are close to the anthropological approach: gender stereotypes and gender identity. When considering the issue of gender stereotypes, studies all look at the behavior of genders in the patriarchal environment of Southern culture. In Femininity in Faulkner's Works: A Reading (Beyond) Gender Difference (1990), Minrose Gwin argued that Faulkner affirmed feminine power, female characters "in a powerful and creative way, have cracked and even destroyed the patriarchal structure" [61,4]. Diane Roberts in Faulkner and Southern Women (1994) named female models in Faulkner's works, associated with the historical upheavals of the South: Confederate women, wet nurses, tragic black-and-white women, beauties and dark witches [according to 37,91]. Also interested in the stereotype of “Southern womanhood”, Caroline Carvill argues that Faulkner “exposed the contradictions in a society that both viewed women as an inferior species and considered them to represent all moral standards” [62,136]. Gender identity and gender identity crisis are also explored in the writings of Doreen Fowler, John N. Duvall, Robert Dale Parker and David Rogers in the collection Faulkner and Gender (Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie, eds., 1994) [63]. The masculine qualities in women, the crisis of masculinity in the South are very valuable suggestions from these studies.

The study of Faulkner’s novels from the perspective of disability studies is a new branch emerging in the history of Faulkner criticism. Two notable long-term works are Alice Hall’s Disability and the Modern Novel: Faulkner, Morrison, Coetzee and the Nobel Prize in Literature (2012) and Taylor Hagood’s Faulkner, Writer of Disability (2014). The common point of these two studies is that they consider normality and disability as cultural constructions, thereby tracing how characters, and the author himself, are governed by and resist those cultural stereotypes. Hagood asserts that Faulkner is “a writer who cherishes abnormality as he challenges the oppression and abandonment promoted by the hegemony of normality” [37,131]. Hall and Hagood continue to explore Faulkner's biography, especially his health impairments and unfulfilled aspirations from his childhood and youth, as a way to explain the writer's preoccupation with disability. These studies offer valuable implications for reading disability as a cultural construct.