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After Malraux, Camus, Sartre and almost all the literary figures of the post-war period, from Marguerite Duras to Claude Simon, here was another writer-thinker in the French language who had come to tell the world that Faulkner is an author who really cannot be ignored, albeit, this time, for an unexpected reason: Faulkner, Glissant tells us, is a writer, indeed almost the only writer, who anticipated the tout-monde: ‘oui, Faulker est un moment de la pensée-monde’ (Glissant, 1996: 143). This, then, was the apparent state of affairs when Glissant's book stirred up the Parisian critical world in 1996, and very shortly afterwards did the same in Faulkner studies, partly as a result of the English translation. It would be too easy to explain this by pointing to the latent and atavistic racism of this ‘white Southerner’, along with the complexity and apparent decline of his style (the difficulty of the books which preceded Go Down Moses ( 1942) was considered to be an indisputable mark of quality by pro-modernist formalists, whereas the ratiocinations of his final novels betrayed, in their view, a delirious and paternalistic humanism). Despite these endeavours, Faulkner has not survived the theoretical turns of these last decades well. Faulkner's heyday was under New Criticism and at the time of the White House's anti-communist policies of the 1950s and 1960s (Schwartz, 1988), and only a small number of brilliant hardliners such as Philip Weinstein, Barbara Ladd, John Mathews, Richard Godden, André Bleikasten and Claude Romano, along with a few others, have continued to explore his work and open it up to the new critical trends of the 1990s (see in particular Mathews, 2004 Ladd, 2003 2007 Loichot, 2003 Romano, 2005 Bleikasten, 2007 Weinstein, 1996 2006 Chrétien, 2009). Indeed, in 1996, compared with other great modernists such as Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Kafka and Musil, Faulkner was beginning to seem outdated, ‘unsaleable’ and even undesirable within the field of literary criticism.
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In Faulkner, Mississippi, Glissant provides us with an innovative reading of an author whose work we thought we already knew almost inside out.