William Faulkner and Mortality

Ahmed Honeini teaches in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. He earned his PhD from Royal Holloway on the work of William Faulkner in 2018, and he was previously educated at King’s College London and University College London. He has published with the Mississippi Quarterly and United States Studies Online. He has also been awarded various research grants, including from the British Association for American Studies (BAAS), the Hemingway Society, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society. Finally, he is the founding director of the Faulkner Studies in the UK Research Network (@Faulkner_UK on Twitter). His main research interests are Faulkner, literary modernism, and American fiction, theatre, and film.

• DedicationAcknowledgments Introduction: Saying No to Death? William Faulkner’s aesthetic of mortality Saying Yes to death in Faulkner’s fictionThe literary tradition of immortality and the modern denial of deathI listen to the voicesChapter 1: A fine dead sound: Quentin Compson’s suicide in The Sound and the FuryJune Second, 1910: Morning – An affectless voice The word that Quentin cannot sayLittle Sister deathJune Second, 1910: Night – A fine dead soundCoda: Three reactions to Quentin’s suicide Chapter 2: Living was terrible: Confrontations with mortality in As I Lay DyingGetting ready to stay deadA shoddy jobA wet seed in the hot blind earthMy mother is a fishThat goddamn boxI have no motherNow I can get them teethChapter 3: Burying the fallen monument: The death of the Old South in "A Rose for Emily" A fallen monument to the Old South A body submerged in waterI want some poisonA strand of iron-gray hairEmily’s rose for the narratorChapter 4: A bloody mischancing of human affairs: Murder and violence in Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! The rootless stranger: Alienation and racial exclusion in Light in AugustSomething is going to happen to me: The murder of Joe ChristmasAn act of passion and violence: The legend of Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!I’m going to tech you, Kernel: Wash Jones’s tragic designChapter 5: Ah’m goan home: Narration, homegoing, and whiteness in Go Down, MosesFaulkner’s narrational distanceHomegoing and the subversion of African American funerary culture Come home, whar we can help youAh’m snakebit and bound to dieBlack bereavement through the lens of whitenessShe just wanted him home Conclusion: Breaking the pencil: Death and voice in Faulkner’s fiction

"This volume brings a valuable contribution to Faulknerian criticism, a noteworthy achievement for an author on whom so much has been written. Honeini’s prose is clear, and the arguments put forward are utterly convincing and perspicuous."-- Solveig Dunkel (University of Picardy-Jules Verne), in Transatlantica: American Studies Journal, 2021 (Volume 2)