MFS Modern Fiction Studies

Abstract:

This essay draws upon recent work in media studies in order to explore William Faulkner's treatment of black voices in Flags in the Dust and The Sound and the Fury. Black voices play instrumental roles in Faulkner's project of reproducing the South by serving as conduits, or mediums, through which the author and his white characters access embodied sensation and psychological interiority. By first exploiting and then critically probing the capacity of black voices to tune white characters into and out of their surroundings and themselves, these novels advance an understanding of race's medial character that culminates in Absalom, Absalom!