Modernism/modernity

abstract:

Readers of William Faulkner's A Fable, his late novel about World War I, have long been puzzled by its amalgam of the political and theological. This article addresses this anomaly by situating A Fable within the intellectual context of Weimar political theology, a discourse of modernity not often brought into discussions of literary modernism. For Weimar political theologians, the recent war and its political aftermath had to be interpreted through foundational categories of theology rather than of secular history. Faulkner, inheriting the leftist variant of this Weimar thought, creates a messianic corporal and his Pauline apostle. They seek to create a new earth in profane times.