Cookie Consent by FreePrivacyPolicy.com
JAAAS logo

Special Issue Articles

Vol. 3 No. 1 (2021): Im/Mobilities in American Culture

William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses: A Chronicle of Im/Mobilities

Submitted
April 30, 2019
Published
2021-12-29

Abstract

"William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) focuses on what the author calls the "earth's long chronicle," a century-long story about an imaginary and truthful land of the American South. In this article, I show how this chronicle is built on the idea of "im/mobility," considered from different perspectives. First, the seven stories that form Go Down, Moses depict various forms of exploitation, the effects induced by time and human movements on fields, woods, and animals, underlying the contrast between an "immobile" wilderness and a "mobile" (tamed, exploited) plantation. Second, these stories follow the destiny of the im/mobile people who inhabit the land—like Ike McCaslin, the most prominent character, who is blamed precisely for his "immobility," i.e. his inability to take action and change the status quo, at the end of the story. Finally, the literary form of Go Down, Moses contains the idea of "im/mobility" in its hybrid and fragmented structure, halfway between a novel and a short story collection.

References

  1. Al-Barhow, Abdul-Razzak. "A Measure of Victory: Go Down, Moses and the Subversion of Racial Codes." English Language and Literature Studies 3, no. 1 (2013): 31-41. https://doi.org/10.5539/ells.v3n1p31.
  2. Buell, Lawrence. "Faulkner and the Claim of the Natural World." In Faulkner and the Natural World, edited by Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie, 1-18. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
  3. Cowley, Malcolm. "Go Down to Faulkner's Land." The New Republic (June 29, 1942): 900.
  4. Creighton, Joanne V. "Revision and Craftsmanship in the Hunting Trilogy of Go Down, Moses." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15, vol. 3 (1973): 577–92.
  5. Davidson, Ian C. "Mobilities of Form." Mobilities 12, no. 4 (2017): 548-58. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2017.1331004.
  6. Davis, Thadious M. "The Game of Courts: Go Down, Moses, Arbitrary Legalities, and Compensatory Boundaries." In New Essays on Go Down, Moses, edited by Linda Wagner-Martin, 129-54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  7. Davis, Thadious M. Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
  8. Dimitri, Carl J. "Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust: From Negative to Positive Liberty." The Faulkner Journal 19, no. 1 (2003): 11-26.
  9. Dunn, Maggie, and Ann Morris. The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.
  10. Evans, David H. "Taking the Place of Nature: The Bear and the Incarnation of America." In Faulkner and the Natural World, edited by Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie, 179-97. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
  11. Faulkner, William. "A Word to Young Writers." Faulkner at Virginia. Accessed on April 28, 2019. http://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/display/wfaudio23_1#wfaudio23_1.13.
  12. Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.
  13. Faulkner, William. Joseph Blotner's introductory class in Types of Literature, Frederick Gwynn's graduate class in American literature. Faulkner at Virginia. Accessed on April 28, 2019. http://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/display/wfaudio29_1#wfaudio29_1.1.
  14. Faulkner, William. Lecture in Frederick Gwynn's literature class. http://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/display/wfaudio01_1#wfaudio01_1.24. Accessed on April 28, 2019.
  15. Gleeson-White, Sarah. "William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses: An American Frontier Narrative." Journal of American Studies 43, no. 3 (2009): 389-405. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875809990685.
  16. Greenblatt, Stephan. "A Mobility Studies Manifesto." In Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
  17. Harrington, Gary. "The Destroyers in Go Down, Moses." Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16, no. 3 (2009): 517-24. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isp060.
  18. Hoffmann, Gerhard. "Myth, Ideology, Symbol and Faulkner’s Modernism/Postmodernism in Go Down, Moses." Amerikastudien/American Studies 42, no. 4 (1997): 661-78.
  19. Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre. The Hague: Mouton, 1971.
  20. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
  21. Lewis, Richard W. B. "The Hero in the New World: William Faulkner's The Bear." In Bear, Man and God: Eight Approaches to William Faulkner's The Bear," edited by Francis Lee Utley, Lynn Z. Bloom, and Arthur F. Kinney, 188-201. New York: Random House, 1971.
  22. Leyda, Julia. American Mobilities: Geographies of Class, Race, and Gender in US Culture. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2016.
  23. Lundén, Rolf. The United Stories of America: Studies in the Short Story Composite. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
  24. Mann, Susan G. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.
  25. Myers, Robert M. "Voluntary Measures: Environmental Stewardship in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses." The Mississippi Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2013): 645-68. https://doi.org/10.1353/mss.2013.0009.
  26. Rowe, John Carlos. "The African-American Voice in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses." In Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy, 76-97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
  27. Saldívar, Ramón, and Sylvan Goldberg. "The Faulknerian Anthropocene: Scales of Time and History in The Wild Palms and Go Down, Moses." In The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, edited by John T. Matthews, 185-203. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
  28. Sartre, Jean-Paul. "On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner." In Literary and Philosophical Essays, translated by Annette Michelson, 84-93. New York: Collier Books, 1962.
  29. Schleifer, Ronald. "Faulkner's Storied Novel: Go Down, Moses and the Translation of Time." Modern Fiction Studies 28, no. 1 (1982): 109-127.
  30. Smith, Jennifer J. The American Short Story Cycle. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
  31. Sultan, Stanley. "Gall Me Ishmael: The Hagiography of Isaac McCaslin." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 3, no. 1 (1961): 50-66.
  32. Tick, Stanley. "The Unity of Go Down, Moses." Twentieth Century Literature 8, no. 2 (1962): 67-73. https://doi.org/10.2307/440988.
  33. Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
  34. Vernon, Zackary. "'Being Myriad, One': Melville and the Ecological Sublime in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses." Studies in the Novel 46, no. 1 (2014): 63-82. https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2014.0035.
  35. Vickery, Olga. The Novels of William Faulkner. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959.
  36. Wagner-Martin, Linda. "Introduction." In New Essays on Go Down, Moses, edited by Linda Wagner-Martin, 1-20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  37. Wittenberg, Judith B. "Go Down, Moses and the Discourse of Environmentalism." In New Essays on Go Down, Moses, edited by Linda Wagner-Martin, 49-72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Similar Articles

51-60 of 99

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.