Faulkner's Media Romance
Julian Murphet
Reviews and Awards
"From our leading theorist of multimedia modernism, by previous title and by any other name, and under the command again of Murphet's dialectical zest as well as virtuoso prose, this book is a gripping revisionary look at Faulkner's means for deflecting his inveterate gothic melodrama with such technomodernist evocations as those associated with the culture industry, from radio and phonography to photoessayism and film, all as a sheltering interface for the novelist's romance atavism. Marxist literary history, formalist narratology, and nuanced genre theory converge on these issues in a monumentally incisive demonstration-and a thrilling critical narrative all its own." - Garrett Stewart, author of Transmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art
"Faulkner's Media Romance is an extraordinary book. With breathtaking originality, Julian Murphet transforms our conceptualizations of Faulkner's motivating thematic concerns, anxieties about genre, and stylistic ambitions. He reimagines the terms of Faulkner's confrontation with modernity and modernism by locating Faulkner's writing within its modern media environment. This book brilliantly demonstrates how Faulkner's engagement with the new forms of mechanical (and later electric) reproduction of voice and visual field constituted both a massive claim on Faulkner's project as a writer, by posing a threat to the very status and purpose of literature, but also provided an unlooked for opportunity to crack open the social mentalities and generic traditions that constrained him. This is criticism of superior intelligence, and its enormous richness will occupy Faulkner scholarship and modernist studies for a good while." - John T. Matthews, Boston University