Cultural-Studies Criticism

Faulkner’s “career” within cultural studies began, within the history of the cultural-studies movement itself, comparatively late. This is not an especially remarkable point about Faulkner or any one particular writers; as a critical movement, cultural studies was never concerned more with any one figure than another, and was always concerned with an interdisciplinary and interdiscursive focus rather than a writer’s singularity. It is a point worth noting, however, because of the specific ways in which Faulkner’s work seems hospitable to cultural studies’ concerns. From his earliest stages of writing, Faulkner was aware of his work’s position within a field of cultural production, as well as within a series of interrelated cultural meanings and social structures. The fact that there is a strong body of work on Faulkner that bears several common elements of a culturalist approach is perhaps less striking than that it took Faulkner studies time to make use of them