Warwick Wadlington's Books

The Confidence Game in American Literature

By: Warwick Wadlington

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The Confidence Game in American Literature

By: Warwick Wadlington

Drawing on modern studies of rhetoric and the concept of the Trickster, the author examines Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Nathanael West as creators of a fictive experience centered in deceptive or problematic transactions of confidence. The model of a confidence game, suggested by the writers' own thematic preoccupations, permits an analysis of the social motivations inherent in the fiction. The author concentrates on the process by which confidence is established and the ways in which deception leads to regeneration and an altered perception of authority. His approach increases our understanding of the interrelation between the writer, his reader, and the world each envisions. Warwick Wadlington examines individual texts, as well as the pattern of each writer's total work. His book distinctively combines an enlarging archetypal frame with rhetorical analysis of the writer-reader imaginative act. Treated as different forms of a coherent mode of fictive experience, the works of these important authors illuminate each other. Professor Wadlington's method results in decisively new readings of each text and contributes to a phenomenology of reading three writers whose works represent crucial "moments" in the artist-audience negotiation of mutual faith. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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345

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Princeton University Press

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ISBN 10

1400871646

ISBN 13

9781400871643

Reading Faulknerian Tragedy

By: Warwick Wadlington

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Reading Faulknerian Tragedy

By: Warwick Wadlington

This could be the best Faulkner study of the decade, the counterpart of Vickery in the 50s and Brooks in the 60s. It is ambitious,powerfully well-informed, and quite as pathbreaking in its approach as one would expect from the author of The Confidence Game in American Literature." -Gary Lee Stonum, Department of English, Case Western Reserve University Reading Faulknerian Tragedy illuminates theories of reading and of tragedy as it poses new questions in respect to four of Faulkner's major novels. Drawing on the work of the literary theorists Kenneth Burke and Mikhail Bakhtin and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Warwick Wadlington gives a coherent account of the aesthetics of Faulkner's tragedy and advocates a model of reading based not on interpretation but on performance. Faulkner's voice, he asserts, functions as an invitation to readers to assume roles, become speakers and thus listeners, and so in a sense complete the text they are reading, and to take pleasure in or suffer the consequences of their role-taking. Offering an "anthropology of rhetoric," Wadlington examines the cultural contexts of Faulkner's writing and describes a kind of tragedy springing from the possibilities of heroic existence in a culture that stresses honor and shame. He defines tragedy as part of a historical, genealogical process, and locates the reading and writing of tragedy within the distinctly human opposition to personal mortality. In his view, reading epitomizes the performance of the scripts of culture itself, and it is one of the cultural activities that constitute persons by furnishing them with the very power to exist. Wadlington offers detailed analyses of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! Rich and provocative in its implications for literary theorists as well as for Faulknerians, the book will also be welcomed by specialists and students of twentieth-century American literature and the novel.

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Page Count

270

Publisher

Cornell University Press

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ISBN 10

1501743740

ISBN 13

9781501743740

The Confidence Game in American Literature

By: Warwick Wadlington

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The Confidence Game in American Literature

By: Warwick Wadlington

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345

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Princeton University Press

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1400871646

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9781400871643

As I Lay Dying

Stories Out of Stories

By: Warwick Wadlington

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As I Lay Dying

Stories Out of Stories

By: Warwick Wadlington

Economically put, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is the story of the death and eventual burial of Addie Bundren, matriarch of the poor, farming, Southern Bundren family, and of the meaning of her death and burial journey to that family. But this is a story that defies a brief summing up. As Addie herself says in the novel, "Words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at". Especially so few words about such a multifaceted work. Embedded in the text is the secret story of each character's inner life; the tangled ensnaring story the characters live together as a family; the universal story of human beings struggling with the meaning of death; the cultural story of the impoverished 1920s in the rural South; the American story of the struggle between individual desire and the collective good. Faulkner unravels all of these stories - and more - from the impelling event of Addie's death. In this concise critical assessment of the novel, Warwick Wadlington takes the view that each of the stories the novel tells simultaneously grows out of and informs the other, much as people shape and are shaped by one another. Faulkner's tendency to show the reader his fictional world from many different angles and points of view - giving each of the characters, for example, a chance to tell his or her private version of a story - is thus echoed in Wadlington's approach to the novel. The author takes into account the many frames through which As I Lay Dying can be perceived - sociohistorical, psychological, cultural, religious, political, artistic, personal - and synthesizes them for the reader. Faulkner's novel as a whole, too, is a story pulled out of older stories that would eventually be takenup by newer ones. As I Lay Dying shows the influence of such master narratives as Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the "Narcissus", Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, James Joyce's Ulysses, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. And it anticipates much 1930's writing, especially John Steinbeck's epic Grapes of Wrath. Faulkner actually began to write As I Lay Dying on the day after the great Wall Street crash of 25 October 1929. He and his novel were thus poised on the brink of enormous change, looking back at a decade that loved risk taking and pleasure and that romanticized rugged individualism - or, perhaps more aptly, rugged entrepreneurship - and forward to a decade that would struggle in a kind of forced collective labor in order to survive - the decade of the Great Depression. The "tightrope walk", as Wadlington calls it, between individualism and collectivism, a long-standing exercise in the South, is a major theme of the novel. Like much else in the book, however, this apparently two-dimensional issue is "honeycombed with ambivalences and cross-purposes", Wadlington writes. While Faulkner acknowledges the necessity and the good of cooperative action, he also knows that the individual may exploit it for selfish purposes and simultaneously deny this self-interest. As the Bundren family together shoulders the burden of transporting Addie's body to its burial site, each family member also carries the weight of his or her own separate past and keeps pushing ahead toward his or her own distinct goal. In a generous-minded and insightful critique, Wadlington focuses and refocuses the fragments of the Bundren's lives that Faulkner reveals to give the reader a multidimensional portrait of thisrich, complex novel.

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Page Count

123

Publisher

Macmillan Reference USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0805781153

ISBN 13

9780805781151

Book's by Warwick Wadlington

The Confidence Game in American Literature

The Confidence Game in American Literature

Reading Faulknerian Tragedy

Reading Faulknerian Tragedy

The Confidence Game in American Literature

The Confidence Game in American Literature

As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying

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