Faulkner, William - Virginia V. Hlavsa (essay date March 1985)
Virginia V. Hlavsa (essay date March 1985)
SOURCE: Hlavsa, Virginia A. “The Mirror, the Lamp, and the Bed: Faulkner and the Modernists.” American Literature 57, no. 1 (March 1985): 23-43.
[In the following essay, Hlavsa outlines the facets of modernist writing and distinguishes Faulkner as a modernist writer.]
Although Faulkner is frequently called a Romantic, it is time that he be placed where he belongs, among the Modernists. In The Mirror and the Lamp, M. H. Abrams distinguishes between the Neo-classical, eighteenth-century artist as a “perceiving” mind, reflecting the external world like a mirror, and the Romantic, nineteenth-century artist as a “projecting” mind, casting a self-image out onto the world like a lamp. T. S. Eliot suggested that the Modernist movement was a return to the hard, spare world of classicism, the exact observation of the external object. But this overlooks the new temporal and spatial...
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