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Southern Expressionism: Apocalyptic Hillscapes, Racial Panoramas, and Lustmord in William Faulkner's Light in August by Jeffrey Stayton Joe Christmas, after walking through Light in August's Jefferson and Freedman Town, comes to view these segregated communities as one panorama for the first time from a hilltop overlooking Jefferson's industrial district, just hours before descending to murder Joanna Burden in Freedman Town. William Faulkner renders Christmas's hillscape as a quite literally abysmal vision, an "open window" technique that parallels what German Expressionist painters had also used in order for their modern cityscapes to appear more volatile -- for Christmas does indeed stand upon the precipice of his own unique racial abyss. As a consequence, rather than offsetting his alienation, the perspective Christmas has gained serves only to heighten his sense of racial isolation more acutely, and through this largely expressionistic technique Faulkner creates in Joe Christmas a southern version of Expressionism's "New Man": a Lustmorder (sexual murderer) who misdirects his impotent rage at his emasculated self and ambiguous identity into misogynistic violence. In this way, Light in August moves southern literature beyond the gothic into a far more modernist incarnation: Southern Expressionism. Although his contact with modernist paintings was limited
The Southern Literary Journal – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Jan 27, 2009
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