Word: faulknerisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Other South is neither creative nor exhaustive, but it opens a relatively unexplored chapter in the Southern and American experiences--one that deserves more attention, as Degler shows. For the present time, though, William Faulkner remains the unrivalled social historian of the Other South, the South and their various causes. And at least until some future historian discovers enough original manuscripts, diaries or records to fill in the history of the dissenting South, the wisdom of Yoknapatawpha will endure...
...tell, the contemporary radio programs on the sound track. But for these details to make out the world fully, they require a more extensive, exhaustive treatment than they are given, and less of the obvious hand in their choice. They need the scope of a novel, the fullness of Faulkner. Like the characters, each detail appears too much in isolation, and we never, by full presence or by effective suggestion, get anything like a film Yoknapatawpha...
...tremendously attractive. It appeals to what is called either the spirit or the guts, depending on your persuasion. In his combination of bungle and dream, Altman is as American as any director, and it may take people who are not Americans to appreciate him best, as it did for Faulkner in the first part of his career. Surely the world of Thieves is unmistakeably American; it is only too bad there is not more...
French cinematographer Jean Boffety has helped give this world a pale damp beauty. Critic Pauline Kael compared the effect to the mood of Faulkner, but there is something lyric and almost painfully beautiful which could exist nowhere outside of film. There are wonderful details of gas stations and motor courts which recall Walker Evans, like the shots taken through screen doors to which bits of a painted bread ad still adhere or the recurrent presence of Coke bottles with their pale green glass, and Coke signs, even at the entrance of the state prison. But the effect of this carefully...
...magical nor mysterious. It's good, it's all there, but it's Blotner. Why not Carvel Collins, Cleanth Brooks, Malcolm Cowley? These names (and writings) ring, echo Quentin Compson, promise a more magical treatment--a story told worthy of the great story-teller. But Collins fought with the Faulkner family a while back--sin number one for a megabiographer--and his biography had to wait for Blotner's. Cleanth Brooks will eventually come out, I hope, with his second volume of Yoknapatawpha, which probably will be the most analytic and thought-provoking treatment. Cowley will probably do what...