Flags in the Dust Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Philip Cohen

Critical Essay by Philip Cohen

SOURCE: Cohen, Philip. “Faulkner's Early Narrative Technique and Flags in the Dust.” Southern Studies 24, no. 2 (summer 1985): 202-20.

In the following essay, Cohen argues that Faulkner first successfully merged elements of the nineteenth-century novel with those of his later modernism in Flags in the Dust.

Twenty-two years after his death, William Faulkner's contribution to the novel remains difficult to categorize. Just as his thought is characterized both by a refusal to reject completely all that the past contains and by a recognition that to reject all change whatsoever is to deny the vital principle of life itself, so Faulkner's art seems paradoxically both realistic and antirealistic, both representational and presentational. Despite such technical tour-de-forces of modernism as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner's life's overall work seems, to me, often centered on creating novels which fuse radical formal experimentation with certain features of...
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