Faulknerista

Catherine Gunther Kodat is the author of Don't Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture. A member of the faculty at Hamilton College for nearly twenty years, she has held senior administrative posts at the University of the Arts, Lewis & Clark College, and Lawrence University of Wisconsin.

"Kodat's stunning volume, collecting twenty-five years of writing and thinking about Faulkner, retrieves from the sidelines of author studies the Faulknerista, a feminine figure who steals bits of time and refuses the capital 'A' author to relish in the partial, marginal, and ill-fated. Kodat begins with the 'earnest young woman' who courageously posed to Faulkner the first question after his famous lectures at the University of Virginia, only to be erased from the publication by its male editors. Moving from this scene in all of its historical potential to Jean Seberg reciting Faulkner aloud in Godard's Breathless and into contemporary television, Kodat cautions against seamless completism. The seams, it turns out, are what it's all about. Faulknerista teaches that the author never stands alone and is only as good as his pairings."--Julie Beth Napolin, co-President of the William Faulkner Society "Catherine Gunther Kodat stakes out a position that is a part of and yet apart from the traditions of single-author scholarship. Her Faulknerista reads the Nobel Laureate's dense and difficult prose for the way it enables engagements with modernist and contemporary culture, as well as the culture industry."--John N. Duvall, author of Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction: From Faulkner to Morrison "Opening with a stirring introduction that acknowledges the central role and legacy of women scholars in the field of Faulkner studies, Faulknerista is essential reading for anyone interested in the twentieth-century intellectual and cultural scene."--Sarah Gleeson-White, editor of William Faulkner at Twentieth-Century Fox: The Annotated Screenplays