SOURCE: Hlavsa, Virginia A. “The Mirror, the Lamp, and the Bed: Faulkner and the Modernists.” American Literature 57, no. 1 (March 1985): 23-43.

In the following essay, Hlavsa outlines the facets of modernist writing and distinguishes Faulkner as a modernist writer.

Although Faulkner is frequently called a Romantic, it is time that he be placed where he belongs, among the Modernists. In The Mirror and the Lamp, M. H. Abrams distinguishes between the Neo-classical, eighteenth-century artist as a “perceiving” mind, reflecting the external world like a mirror, and the Romantic, nineteenth-century artist as a “projecting” mind, casting a self-image out onto the world like a lamp. T. S. Eliot suggested that the Modernist movement was a return to the hard, spare world of classicism, the exact observation of the external object. But this overlooks the new temporal and spatial reordering and even disordering of the external world, primarily in response to...