In Faulkner, Mississippi, Glissant provides us with an innovative reading of an author whose work we thought we already knew almost inside out. Indeed, in 1996, compared with other great modernists such as Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Kafka and Musil, Faulkner was beginning to seem outdated, ‘unsaleable’ and even undesirable within the field of literary criticism. Faulkner's heyday was under New Criticism and at the time of the White House's anti-communist policies of the 1950s and 1960s (Schwartz, 1988), and only a small number of brilliant hardliners such as Philip Weinstein, Barbara Ladd, John Mathews, Richard Godden, André Bleikasten and Claude Romano, along with a few others, have continued to explore his work and open it up to the new critical trends of the 1990s (see in particular Mathews, 2004; Ladd, 2003; 2007; Loichot, 2003; Romano, 2005; Bleikasten, 2007; Weinstein, 1996; 2006; Chrétien, 2009). Despite these endeavours, Faulkner has not survived the theoretical turns of these last decades well. It would be too easy to explain this by pointing to the latent and atavistic racism of this ‘white Southerner’, along with the complexity and apparent decline of his style (the difficulty of the books which preceded Go Down Moses (1942) was considered to be an indisputable mark of quality by pro-modernist formalists, whereas the ratiocinations of his final novels betrayed, in their view, a delirious and paternalistic humanism).