Faulkner's Cartographies of Consciousness

Book excerpt: William Faulkner continues to be an author who is widely read, studied, and admired. This book provides a new and interdisciplinary account of Faulkner's legacy, arguing that his fiction is just as relevant today as it was during his own time. Indeed, Faulkner's far-reaching critique of his Southern heritage speaks directly to the anti-racism discourse of our own time and engages the dire threat to subjecthood in a technologically saturated civilization. Combining literary critique with network and complexity science, this study offers a new reading of William Faulkner as a novelist for the information age. Over the course of his career, we find an artist struggling to articulate the threat to human wellbeing in rapidly scaling social systems and gradually developing a hard-won humanism that affirms the individual and interpersonal life as a source of novelty and social change.