The Signifying Eye: Seeing Faulkner’s Art

'Waid presents a major new reading of Faulkner, his art, and his literary genealogy. Her goal is 'to both reinscribe Faulkner in a tradition and to address the complex art found in his self-conscious riddles and signifying excesses.' She begins by relocating his work within an American literary mainstream long dominated by women writers and writers of color. She then turns to the full spectrum of Faulkner's work in its relation to art and the artist: from the plethora of images connoting the crisis of creation and procreation to his use of pictorial forms, patterns of words, and word-shaped blank spaces to his intense engagement with abstract art, especially the paintings of Whistler and de Kooning. Waid argues that Faulkner had a pivotal influence on the origins of abstract expressionism and that his influence is seen most notably in the work of Willem de Kooning'--