Afterword - “The Wrong People,” Filling in the ––––, and New Faulkner Studies

Summary

As I write this afterword, the COVID-19 pandemic rages, taking lives, crippling national economies, and wreaking havoc on the emotional and physical health of people around the world. It is too soon to know the full impact the pandemic will have on academia and literary and cultural critical discourse. The stresses of this moment can disrupt the concentration needed to produce scholarship, and the accompanying economic crisis could lead to institutional cost-cutting that might threaten professional literary criticism. While we know – or, at least, think and hope – that literary critical discourses will survive this crisis, we may not be sure what those discourses will look like and, for those of us contributing to this volume, where the writing of William Faulkner will fit into them. History attests to Faulkner’s remaining a central force in literary criticism, but history does not always accurately predict the future. We might be forgiven for seeing ahead only a blank to be filled.