Doreen Fowler

Faulkner and the Southern Renaissance

In an original contribution to the psychoanalytic approach to literature, Doreen Fowler focuses on the fiction of four major American writers—William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison—to examine the father's function as a "border figure." Although the father has most commonly been interpreted as the figure who introduces opposition and exclusion to the child, Fowler finds in these literary depictions fathers who instead support the construction of a social identity by mediating between cultural oppositions. Fowler counters the widely accepted notion that boundaries are solely sites of exclusion and offers a new theoretical model of boundary construction. She argues that boundaries are mysterious, dangerous, in-between places where a balance of sameness and difference makes differentiation possible. In the fiction of these southern writers, father figures introduce a separate cultural identity by modeling this mix of relatedness and difference. Fathers intervene in the mother-child relationship, but the father is also closely related to both mother and child. This model of boundary formation as a balance of exclusion and relatedness suggests a way to join with others in an inclusive, multicultural community and still retain ethnic, racial, and gender differences. Fowler's model for the father's mediating role in initiating gender, race, and other social differences shows not only how psychoanalytic theory can be used to interpret fiction and cultural history but also how literature and history can reshape theory.

The Father Reimagined in Faulkner, Wright, O'Connor, and Morrison

Drawing the Line

From Outrage to Affirmation

Faulkner's Changing Vision

Ann J. Abadie

The essays in this volume address William Faulkner and the issue of race. Faulkner resolutely has probed the deeply repressed psychological dimensions of race, asking in novel after novel the perplexing question: what does blackness signify in a predominantly white society? However, Faulkner's public statements on the subject of race have sometimes seemed less than fully enlightened, and some of his black characters, especially in the early fiction, seem to conform to white stereotypical notions of what black men and women are like. These essays, originally presented by Faulkner scholars, black and white, male and female, at the 1986 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, the thirteenth in a series of conferences held on the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi, explore the relationship between Faulkner and race.With essays byEric J. SundquistCraig WernerBlyden JacksonThadious DavisPamela J. RhodesWalter TaylorNoel PolkJames A. SneadPhilip M. WeinsteinLothar HoumlnnighausenFrederick R. KarlHoke PerkinsSergei ChakovskyMichael GrimwoodKarl F. Zender

Faulkner and Race

Faulkner and Women

Faulkner and Humor

Faulkner: International Perspectives

The contributors, authorities on Faulkner's narrative, offer a wide variety of critical approaches to Faulkner's fiction-writing process

Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1987

Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction

Fowler exposes psychic conflicts that drive Faulkner's fiction and posits from them an underlying tension between the desire for difference and wholeness, between the mother and the father, between the living body and death.

The Return of the Repressed

Faulkner

Here scholars seek out the influence of popular culture upon the Nobel Prize author & note his forays into the pop culture world.

Doreen Fowler

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