Bitches, Bastards, and Book Bans: Finding Space for William Faulkner in The Face of False Canonization

My thesis focuses on 20th Century American Literature and the critical and popular reception to this literature over the past hundred years. More specifically, it is a study of William Faulkner, three of his most well-known novels: The Sound and The Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Light and August, and the critical and popular response to Faulkner and these three novels. To narrow my interest even further, what I was most specifically struck by was the idea of “false canonization” – that is canonizations that are incomplete and do not accurately represent how authors are establishing their identities within their own works. I looked at the three novels I mentioned above individually, and for each novel, I engaged only with the critics that aided me the most in my understanding of who Faulkner was, or rather who he was not. I argue that since literature that is considered to be activist is being banned, we cannot fill that void with works that have been falsely canonized. Instead of rigid, inflexible canonizations I advocate for flexible and wholistic canonizations that can be easily adapted to the current political and social moment without misrepresenting authors like Faulkner as allies.Bachelor of Art