[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":3,"doc-seo-665006-105":59,"doc-detail-665006-en":129},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",[7,13,18,23,28,33,38,43,48,51,55],{"id":8,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":10,"show_sort_weight":11,"slug":12},1,"Document","Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":14,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":15,"show_sort_weight":16,"slug":17},2,"Literature",80,"literature",{"id":19,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":20,"show_sort_weight":21,"slug":22},4,"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":24,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":25,"show_sort_weight":26,"slug":27},5,"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":29,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":30,"show_sort_weight":31,"slug":32},6,"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":34,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":35,"show_sort_weight":36,"slug":37},7,"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":39,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":40,"show_sort_weight":41,"slug":42},8,"Research & Report",30,"research-report",{"id":44,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":45,"show_sort_weight":46,"slug":47},9,"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":46,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":49,"show_sort_weight":46,"slug":50},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":52,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":53,"show_sort_weight":52,"slug":54},10,"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":56,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":57,"show_sort_weight":24,"slug":58},19,"General","general",{"code":4,"msg":60,"data":61},"ok",{"site_id":62,"language":63,"slug":64,"title":65,"keywords":66,"description":67,"schema_data":68,"social_meta":122,"head_meta":124,"extra_data":126,"updated_unix":128},105,"en","faulkners-coffin","Faulkner’s Coffin","","This article examines William Faulkner’s use of the coffin form in As I Lay Dying, asking how the aesthetic shape of the coffin functions as a kind of strange realism. It considers how Faulkner typographically reproduces the coffin within the text and argues that the coffin is constitutive of the novel’s meaning rather than only a trope or symbol. To support the claim, the discussion draws on Frederic Jameson’s dialectical model of realism, where the realist text involves a push-and-pull between a force and its opposite, and on the novel’s carpentry of lists and narrative objects.",{"@graph":69,"@context":121},[70,84,104],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":15,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/literature/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/faulkners-coffin/665006/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":98,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":99,"interactionStatistic":100},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/faulkners-coffin/665006.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"EvelynWrites","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-29",true,{"@type":101,"interactionType":102,"userInteractionCount":8},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":103},"ViewAction",{"@type":105,"mainEntity":106},"FAQPage",[107,113,117],{"name":108,"@type":109,"acceptedAnswer":110},"What does the article identify as Faulkner’s use of the coffin form in As I Lay Dying?","Question",{"text":111,"@type":112},"The article argues that Faulkner uses the coffin as an aesthetic and typographic form that shapes how the story makes meaning, functioning as a strange realism rather than only a symbol.","Answer",{"name":114,"@type":109,"acceptedAnswer":115},"How does Jameson’s theory of realism support the article’s main argument?",{"text":116,"@type":112},"It draws on Frederic Jameson’s view that realism is not straightforward mimesis, but a dialectical process involving a specific force and its exact opposite, helping frame the coffin’s structural role.",{"name":118,"@type":109,"acceptedAnswer":119},"Why does the article treat the narrative structure as coffin-like or object-like?",{"text":120,"@type":112},"It links Cash’s carpentry with an adjacent construction of narrative, arguing that Faulkner’s rotating lists create a perspectivally “hexagonal” textual object that is continually rebuilt across chapters.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":123,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":125,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":127,"site_id":62},665006,1793285007,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":130},{"doc_id":127,"user_id":131,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":132,"doc_module":4,"category_id":14,"category_name":15,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":133,"file_id":134,"file_url":135,"file_type":136,"file_size":137,"view_count":8,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":138,"language":139,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":140,"faqs":141,"seo_title":142,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":128,"read_time":143},687212989558,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_a8503ba1806abce46bf441b54a3ca4cd","Faulkner’s Coffin  \nAlyson Brickey  \nUniversity of Toronto  \nABSTRACT  \nThis article examines William Faulkner’s use of the coffin form in his depression-era family epic, As I Lay Dying. I ask whether we can envision what Faulkner is doing with the aesthetic shape of the coffin—a form which he even typographically reproduces within the text itself—as a kind of strange realism. In order to make this argument, I recruit Frederic Jameson’s recent discussion in The Antinomies of Realism, where he argues that the realist text is not a straightforward mimetic project, but rather involves a dialectical push-and-pull between a specific force and its exact opposite. Faulkner’s lists perform a kind of metaphysical carpentry that asks us to consider the coffin not just as a textual trope or a symbol, but as a form that is itself constitutive of the way this story makes meaning.  \nKEYWORDS  \nRealism, Faulkner, Jameson, Modernism, The Great Depression, Narrative, Literary Objects  \nCopyright 2016 © (Brickey) . Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC by-nc-nd 4.0) .  \nBrickey Faulkner’s Coffin  \nWritten on the cusp of America’s Great Depression, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is populated with characters who live in a place that is irrevocably physical. Here, the heat of the summer sun and the dryness of the Southern landscape confront us with a tangible, earthly immediacy. Set in the Deep South (Mississippi to be exact, in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County), the text follows the Bundrens, a struggling farming family headed by the bullish and inconsiderate patriarch, Anse Bundren. This is a man who is, in the words of his late wife Addie,“a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame”(Faulkner 173) . Addie Bundren serves as the narrative counterbalance to Anse: she is the heart of the novel, and her death in first chapter propels the family to trek across the state, rotting corpse and all, in a bid to fulfill her dying wish to be buried in Jefferson. Faulkner creates a narrative world that is consistently threatening to careen out of control; maintaining the balance between Anse’s destructive selfishness and Addie’s role as the familial connective tissue proves difficult for even the most careful of characters. In what follows, I focus on Faulkner’s carpenter, Cash Bundren: the dutiful son who is obsessed with building his mother the perfect coffin “on a balance” and who tries so hard to please his father (165) . In many ways, Cash is the novel’s consistent casualty; whenever things tilt dangerously in one direction another, it is very often at his expense.  \nI argue that Faulkner stages two simultaneous scenes of carpentry, paralleling Cash’s constant building with an adjacent narrative construction of his own. Through the use of a rotating list of character-focused narration, whereby each chapter is told from a different person’s point of view, Faulkner performs a kind of textual carpentry, and constructs a perspectivally six-sided textual object.1 Much like Addie’s coffin, this hexagonal narrative structure is meticulously crafted as we progress through each chapter, and yet it is also always in the process of being remade, and built again. My interest in the materiality of the coffin is both an attempt to take seriously Faulkner’s attention to a particular kind of object and an engagement with literary theory’s recent interest in the philosophical status of material things in the world.  \nBrickey Faulkner’s Coffin  \nNo longer just the purview of Marxism or book history, literary scholarship’s relationship to the material is rapidly shifting, with approaches such as Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology breaking new ground. From the highly influential special issue of Critical Inquiry entitled “Things” in 2001, to Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects, Graham Harman’s Guerilla Metaphysics, and Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects, thinkers in","cbCaia6kTlvQ4iOD","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaia6kTlvQ4iOD","pdf",195136,23,"English","# Abstract\n# Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and the physical world\n## Anse, Addie, and the family’s journey\n## Cash Bundren and the making of the coffin\n# Coffin-like textual construction and rotating narration\n## Six-sided narrative object and ongoing reconstruction\n# Material objects in literary theory\n## Cultural debris and object-initiated action\n# Ekphrasis, the list form, and metaphysical carpentry\n## Homer and The Shield of Achilles","[{\"question\":\"What does the article identify as Faulkner’s use of the coffin form in As I Lay Dying?\",\"answer\":\"The article argues that Faulkner uses the coffin as an aesthetic and typographic form that shapes how the story makes meaning, functioning as a strange realism rather than only a symbol.\"},{\"question\":\"How does Jameson’s theory of realism support the article’s main argument?\",\"answer\":\"It draws on Frederic Jameson’s view that realism is not straightforward mimesis, but a dialectical process involving a specific force and its exact opposite, helping frame the coffin’s structural role.\"},{\"question\":\"Why does the article treat the narrative structure as coffin-like or object-like?\",\"answer\":\"It links Cash’s carpentry with an adjacent construction of narrative, arguing that Faulkner’s rotating lists create a perspectivally “hexagonal” textual object that is continually rebuilt across chapters.\"}]","Faulkner’s Coffin | PDF",35]