The Discourse of Race and the "Passing" Text: Faulkner's "Light in August"

• Published in: Amerikastudien Vol. 42; no. 4; pp. 529 - 536
• Main Author: Ickstadt, Heinz
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Heidelberg Universitätsverlag C. Winter 01-01-1997; C. Winter
• Subjects: African Americans; American literature; Black people; Discourse; Modernist art; Novels; Racism; Rhetoric; Symbolic order; White people
• ISSN: 0340-2827; 2625-2155

The essay places the resurgent interest in Faulkner in the context of postmodern as well as ethnic emphasis on fabulation and the creation of written oral texts; but it sees it also as part of an interethnic or interracial dialogue within American literature in which Faulkner tests the dominant discourse of race and gender from the position of the subject, i.e., from within. It argues that in Light in August, Faulkner's most radical critique of the rhetoric of racial division, he replaces the rigid symbolic order of white patriarchy (the dominance of the letter that kills) with a softer and more flexible one which has absorbed the fluidity of the feminine, the black, and the oral.