William Faulkner and the World Literature Debate: Is the Radical in Radical Form the Radical in Radical Politics?

Abstract

Faulkner's work, reputation, and impact have a particular resonance for questions of literature's relationship to the material world and its agency within it. He at times insisted that he aspired to write for himself rather than an audience, and his fiction uses a style and language that provocatively challenges readers. Still, his work has had special purchase for so many global writers who read English as a second language or who needed to access his work through translations. In their own voices, these global authors consistently yoke both Faulkner's style and his context as the double‐sided base of his importance for them. This productive connection between stylistics and worldliness indicates to the critic of world literatures the necessity of reading global texts both from a distance and from up close.