Critical Reception of William Faulkner’s

The history of reception of William Faulkner’s most cherished work, The Sound and the Fury, tellingly reveals the changes that have occurred in reader attitude toward the novel since its first publication in 1929. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the modalities of interpretation employed by three, culturally and historically distinct “interpretive communities” (Fish 1980): American literary critics and reviewers evaluating the novel upon its first publication, Romanian literary critics and reviewers expressing their opinion on the Romanian translation of the novel published in 1971, and contemporary Internet bloggers and commenters discussing their reading experience with the novel.

Relying on Hans Robert Jauss’s notions of “aesthetic distance” and “horizon of expectation” (Jauss 1970, 1982), I have raised two questions that I will try to answer at the end of this paper. First, I would like to see whether the literary career of The Sound and the Fury follows the trajectory from initial rejection to wide acceptance with increasing aesthetic value, as predicted by Jauss’s theory. Second, I am interested in finding out whether those features of the novel that were initially perceived as unfamiliar and incomprehensible were indeed incorporated into the later readers’ horizon of expectations, so that they no longer pose problems for the readers.