Faulkner on Omnibus : A Portrait of the Artist as aA a Cultural Ambassador in the MakingCultural Making

Largely neglected by scholars, the Omnibus profile of Faulkner-a short film in which he plays himself-is an unusual but instructive document of this post-Nobel transformation in progress.2 As such, it preserves in an encapsulated form a juncture at which Faulkner was becoming an actor in a geopoliti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American studies (Lawrence) 2020-10, Vol.59 (4), p.7-73
Main Author: Atkinson, Ted
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Audiences
Brochures
Cold War
Cultivation
Culture
Democracy
Diplomatic & consular services
Drama
Faulkner, William (1897-1962)
Historical reenactments
Ideology
Mass media
Motion pictures
Nielsen ratings
Nobel prizes
Short films
Television programming
Theater
Transformation
Writers
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Summary:Largely neglected by scholars, the Omnibus profile of Faulkner-a short film in which he plays himself-is an unusual but instructive document of this post-Nobel transformation in progress.2 As such, it preserves in an encapsulated form a juncture at which Faulkner was becoming an actor in a geopolitical theater of cultural Cold War routinely staged in mass media.3 The production of Faulkner's big TV moment employed the ascendant medium as an instrument for rendering the local and global domains the author now inhabited as a writer of international renown.4 The magnitude of the appearance for Faulkner is apparent when taking into account that Omnibus regularly drew a viewership in the range of seventeen million.5 By this measure, it was by far the largest audience that Faulkner was ever able to reach at once. In presenting Faulkner to the viewer, the production renders what he famously dubbed his "postage stamp of native soil" in Mississippi fertile ground for the cultivation of personal convictions and literary achievements presented as testaments to the generative possibilities afforded by American democracy.6 Faulkner on Omnibus took shape from a combination of televisual image-making and trademark selffashioning that helped to refine the persona that the writer-diplomat would carry with him to the far-flung places and people he sought to address in the interest of advancing U.S. interests amid a heated ideological conflict on a global scale. [...]it was so influential that it became a model for the development of PBS at the end of the 1960s. [...]the brochure describes the show as "neither highbrow nor lowbrow," making it middlebrow by default without stating as much.
ISSN:0026-3079
2153-6856