Inventing Benjy: William Faulkner’s Most Splendid Creative Leap
Frédérique Spill, "Inventing Benjy: William Faulkner’s Most Splendid Creative Leap"
English | ISBN: 1496849000 | 2024 | 300 pages | EPUB, PDF | 3 MB + 5 MB
English | ISBN: 1496849000 | 2024 | 300 pages | EPUB, PDF | 3 MB + 5 MB
Inventing Benjy: William Faulkner’s Most Splendid Creative Leap is a groundbreaking work at the intersection of Faulkner studies and disability studies. Originally published in 2009 by Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle as L’Idiotie dans l’œuvre de Faulkner, this translation brings the book to English-language readers for the first time. Author Frédérique Spill begins with a sustained look at the monologue of Benjy Compson, the initial first-person narrator in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Spill questions the reasons for this narrative choice, bringing readers to consider Benjy’s monologue, which is told by a narrator who is deaf and cognitively disabled, as an impossible discourse. This paradoxical discourse, which relies mostly on senses and sensory perception, sets the foundation of a sophisticated poetics of idiocy. Using this form of writing, Faulkner shaped perspective from a disabled character, revealing a certain depth to characters that were previously only portrayed on a shallow level. This style encompasses some of the most striking forms and figures of his leap into modern(ist) writing. In that respect,
Read more