In his introduction to this volume of essays, editor Peter Lurie gamely addresses the why question informing what he and other contributors undertake in Faulkner and Film: why revisit the perennial topic of this collection and the 2010 conference it grew out of? Professional readers who regularly teach Faulkner's work or write about it will find useful arguments and analyses in Faulkner and Film and are likely as well to feel inspired to rethink their understanding of Faulkner's work, of modernism and modernity, and to question their broader understanding of what it means to analyze and theorize about “film” or “cinema” and to conceptualize about media ecologies more broadly.

These essays build on what one contributor refers to as “typical approaches” to Faulkner and film, focussing on screen adaptations of Faulkner's fiction and the influence of the movies on Faulkner's writing (71). These familiar orientations include accounts of Faulkner's Hollywood screenwriting career and of the coincidence of his most original and memorable work and Hollywood's own “golden age,” including reconsiderations of Faulkner's work with numerous collaborators, most notably director Howard Hawks and his script supervisor, Meta Carpenter, and of a never-filmed script for a wartime biopic on Charles de Gaulle (102, 110). Building on these reconsiderations, most contributors also argue for innovative approaches to Faulkner's narrative artistry. Aaron Nyerges, for example, bases his phenomenological reading of Light in August (1932) as a product of the parallel genealogies of modernism and the movies on conjectures about Faulkner's adolescent movie-going (55) and on Gilles Deleuze's cinematic-image taxonomy (53) and his “cinematographic mutation” hypothesis (62). Deborah Barker's elucidation of the mammy figure in Requiem for a Nun (1951) also draws on Deleuze's image taxonomy in explaining the effect of close-up shots in a 1961 screen adaptation of Sanctuary (1931) (88).

This collection also recasts the ongoing Faulkner colloquy by introducing newer subfields in Faulkner studies such as “sound studies” (xvii) as a complement to more established arguments emphasizing “photographic effects” (18) in Faulkner's fiction. One of the volume's most fascinating contributions, Riché Richardson's “Oprah's Faulkner,” shifts the focus of Faulkner-and-film studies from the big screens of the twentieth century to this century's smaller screens by assaying the Oprah Winfrey Book Club's televised, Web-enhanced 2005 “Summer of Faulkner.” Richardson makes a compelling case for Faulkner-the-screenwriter as Winfrey's “precursor in ‘translating’ literature to a mass media audience” (122).

While Winfrey celebrated Faulkner's most familiar canonic novels – The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Light in August – teachers tempted (as I've often been) to lead students beyond these acknowledged classics will be cheered by various contributors’ brief illuminating aperçus about Pylon (1935), especially in Stefan Solomon's enlightening account of the “Hollywood genealogy,” “the singular origins” (116, 104), of A Fable (1954). Teachers may also be encouraged by Richardson's essay to include Faulkner's Temple Drake novels, Requiem for a Nun or Sanctuary, on their syllabi. Among these eye-opening accounts of Faulkner's less frequently taught fiction, the standout may be Gene Smith's generously illustrated essay on “metafictional hybridization” in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (1939), especially its “Wild Palms” section. Smith explicates Faulkner's “process of genre redemption” (189) and clarifies our understanding of Faulkner's (and perhaps several other American modernist writers’) lover's quarrel with mass entertainment, particularly with Hollywood.Footnote ¹

Culminating in an analytic homage to Abasalom, Absalom! (1936) – “an authentic literary miracle” (216) – Julian Murphet's closing overview and update of more than a generation's worth of “conceptual sea changes” (197) in Faulkner studies, film studies, and modernism studies (197) warns against “historical amnesia” (198) and argues for Faulkner's central role in the “history of a cinematic century” (203) and his “pride of place in the history of cinema” and “in a literary history of film” (206, 210). Murphet also accentuates the extent to which, however readers respond to individual contributors’ arguments and analyses, Faulkner and Film as a whole provides an invaluable resource. As all university press books should, this collection provides a bibliographical cornucopia, including information about emerging work in Faulkner studies, modernism studies, and film studies. Though a boon to professionals and students alike, more editorial attention to fluency and clarity might have made Faulkner and Film an even more useful resource for lay and professional readers alike.