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Modernism In Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

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In As I Lay Dying, the darkly humorous story of the poor white Bundren family's journey from farm to town to bury its matriarch Addie, Faulkner uses the experimental forms associated with modernism to depict the impact of the sociocultural era called modernity, and the processes of urbanization and industrialization known as modernization, on poor whites in the rural South. Understanding the novel's engagement with rural life in the modern era redefines the relationship of Faulkner's work to the literature and politics of its Depression era context, exposes the social and aesthetic import of rural obsolescence, and suggests a means of rethinking modernism writ large. Through this personage, the novel explores the creation of the modern, laying …show more content…

Slaves who "sweat in the fields" create patrician wealth (78), while poor white workers define "the difference between white men and white men" (183): a planter leisurely reclines "in a barrel stave hammock" (184), while a poor white engages in labor "brutish and stupidly out of proportion to its reward" (191). "White sweat," the labor of white tenant farmers like Snopes, also upholds de Spain's whiteness: poor white labor cultivates both the farm's crops and the respectability of "gentleman farmers" like Major de Spain. Faulkner's sweat economy makes visible several key modes of labor in Southern history: slave labor in Absalom, Absalom!, tenant labor in "Barn Burning," and the labor of small farmers kept at the level of subsistence farming by an agribusiness market dominated by large landholders in As I Lay Dying. Finally, recognizing rural modernism brings Faulkner's works further into the fold of modernism writ large by explicating the ways in which ostensibly uneven anti-modern textual elements--slow-moving wagons and sweating farmers--work in the service of the

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