Philip M. Weinstein

William Faulkner was the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century, yet he lived a life marked by a pervasive sense of failure. Throughout his career, he remained haunted by his inability to master a series of personal and professional his less-than-heroic military career; the loss of his brother in an airplane crash; a disappointing stint as a Hollywood screenwriter; and a destructive bout with alcoholism. In this imaginative biography, Philip Weinstein--a leading authority on the great novelist--targets Faulkner's embattled sense of self as central to both his life and his work. Weinstein shows how Faulkner's troubled interactions with time, place, and history--with antebellum practices and racial division--take on their fullest meanings in his fiction. Exploring the resonance of his own unpreparedness, Faulkner invented a singular language that captured human consciousness under stress as never before. Becoming Faulkner joins Faulkner's life and art in a bold new way, giving readers a full vantage from which to better understand this twentieth-century literary genius.Weinstein shows how Faulkner's troubled interactions with time, place, and history--with antebellum practices and southern heritage--form a pattern that played out over the course of his entire life. At the same time, these incidents take on their fullest meanings in his fiction. It was in meditating on his failures, his own unreadiness, Weinstein argues, that Faulkner came up with his singular language, one that captured human consciousness under stress as never before. His fruitless striving catapulted American literature to a new level of sophistication.Narrating the events that comprised Faulkner's life, biographers have long struggled to depict his personal complexity, the paradoxes that shaped his decisions and dogged his relationships. But without a consideration of the writing as well, the troubles in the life fail to reveal their deeper resonance. By skillfully analyzing the work while tracing the events, Weinstein achieves a full portrait, revealing struggles that animate his life and shadows that complicate his work. Becoming Faulkner thus conjoins Faulkner's life and art in a bold new way, giving readers a full vantage from which to better understand this twentieth-century literary genius.

Weinstein investigates the stories blacks and whites, men and women, tell about each other through the work of two quintessential American William Faulkner and and Toni Morrison. Exploring deep-rooted understandings of race and gender and describing how differently their "Americanness" resonates in both writers' works, What Else But Love? considers the legacy of slavery in a variety of ways, from the meaning of mammies and mothers to the question of black manhood.

Philip Weinstein explores the modernist commitment to "unknowing" by addressing the work of three supreme experimental Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner. In their novels, the narrative props that support the drama of coming to know are refused. When space turns uncanny rather than lawful, when time ceases to be linear and progressive, objects and others become unfamiliar. So does the subject seeking to know them. Weinstein argues that modernist texts work, by way of surprise and arrest, to subvert the familiarity and narrative progression intrinsic to realist fiction. Rather than staging the drama of coming to know, they stage the drama of coming to unknow. The signature move of modernism is shock, just as resolution is the trademark of realism. Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner wrought their most compelling experimental effects by undermining an earlier Enlightenment project of knowing. Weinstein draws on major Enlightenment thinkers to identify constituent components of the narrative of "coming to know"―the progressive narrative underwriting two centuries of Western realist fiction. The book proceeds by framing modernist unknowing between prior practices of realist knowing, on the one hand, and, on the other, certain later practices―postmodern and postcolonial―that move beyond knowing altogether. In so doing, Weinstein proposes a metahistory of the Western novel, from Daniel Defoe to Toni Morrison.

Faulkner's Subject offers a reading of William Faulkner for our time, and does so by rethinking his masterpieces through the lenses of current critical theory. The book attends equally to the power of his work and to the current theoretical issues that would call that power into question. Drawing on poststructuralist, ideological, and gender theory, Weinstein examines the harrowing process of "becoming oneself" at the heart of these novels. This self is always male, and it achieves focus only through strategically mystifying or marginalizing women and blacks. The cosmos he called his own--the textual world he produced, of which he would be "sole owner and proprietor"--merges as a cosmos no one owns, a verbal territory also generated (and biased) by the larger culture's discourses of gender and race. Like personal identity itself, it is a cosmos no one owns.

Book by Weinstein, Philip M.

This work examines the dialectic of desire and value, as it affects the protagonist's identity, in fiction from Dickens and George Eliot through Hardy and Conrad to Lawrence and Joyce. Philip Weinstein describes the growing sexualization of the imagined body--the transformation of the protagonistic self from a figure defined by semantics, signification, and cultural value to one characterized by desire, force, and natural impulse.Originally published in 1984.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.