Highlights from the Oprah site

I was just fishing around on Oprah's site for Faulkner. Of course, it was an important event for Faulkner scholars when Oprah decided to throw her considerable clout behind the dead Mississippian. But we can't lose sight, or water down, the important work we do.

Here's a passage from the bio posted on her site, by none other than Jay Parini, recent biographer of Faulkner:

What is so special about Faulkner? For a start, he turned what he called his own little "postage stamp" of a county in Mississippi into a mythic place. He called this region Yoknapatawpha County, and all of his important works are set in that mythical kingdom, whose county seat is Jefferson, and which is bounded on the north by the Tallahatchie River and on the south by the Yoknapatawpha River. This fictional county covers roughly 2,400 square miles, and is home to the many families Faulkner writes about in the novels and stories, including the Compsons of The Sound and the Fury, the Bundrens of As I Lay Dying and Joe Christmas in Light in August. The genius of Faulkner was to create a whole universe from local materials, surveying society from the highborn to the low, creating a fictional world by increments, in book after book, so that readers can see a vision unfold in astonishing detail as they progress from story to story. Faulkner's key subject, he said in his Nobel speech, was "the human heart in conflict with itself," and that conflict animates his fiction.

In the end, William Faulkner stands alone, a master of tragic farce, a wild-eyed comedian, a storyteller of the highest order. He not only told his stories; he retold them, revising the tales of Yoknapatawpha County in book after book, as characters appear and reappear, often at different periods of their lives, in different circumstances. Faulkner is one of those writers one lives in, learns to read, and comes to love. He deserved the high praise he received from critics around the world, and his presence in American literature is permanent and inspiring.

Parini knowingly skips over so many problems here that I'm frustrated with him. I suppose we like to admire the guy, but is he joking? What about the fact that Faulkner revised and republished material - changing character names, changing relationships, mis-remembering his own work or making mistakes in consistency? He's a great writer, but he's not God.

There are, however, some great resources on this site, such as a good timeline.

The video lectures are also pretty nifty.