Download or read book Poetic Justice in William Faulkner s Absalom Absalom written by Manuela Gertz and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2010-07 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 2,5, University of Stuttgart, course: William Faulkner, language: English, abstract: In his novel "Absalom, Absalom " William Faulkner recounts the story of Thomas Sutpen, a pioneer who tries to establish his family dynasty in the Southern aristocratic plantation society in Mississippi. Thomas Sutpen rigorously pursues his design at all costs, not considering the possible consequences. This moral flaw in his character causes the downfall of his dynasty and the destruction of the whole family. At the end of the novel Sutpen's Hundred, the decaying mansion Sutpen built to accomplish his design, is burned down, together with the last descendants of the family. This tragic development of the story provokes the idea of poetic justice, where virtue is rewarded and vice is punished. But can such a sharp categorization really be applied on this complex novel? In the following paper I will show whether the term poetic justice can be applied on "Absalom, Absalom ". I will take a look at the elements which might support this assumption by considering the characters' development and function in the novel in order to show if they support the idea of punishment or reward. However, first of all I will take a closer look at the term poetic justice in general. I will give a definition, view its origins and examine its use in historical and recent context before applying it on Faulkner's novel "Absalom, Absalom ".
Download or read book Poetic Justice in William Faulkner s Absalom Absalom written by Manuela Gertz and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2010-07-13 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 2,5, University of Stuttgart, course: William Faulkner, language: English, abstract: In his novel “Absalom, Absalom!” William Faulkner recounts the story of Thomas Sutpen, a pioneer who tries to establish his family dynasty in the Southern aristocratic plantation society in Mississippi. Thomas Sutpen rigorously pursues his design at all costs, not considering the possible consequences. This moral flaw in his character causes the downfall of his dynasty and the destruction of the whole family. At the end of the novel Sutpen’s Hundred, the decaying mansion Sutpen built to accomplish his design, is burned down, together with the last descendants of the family. This tragic development of the story provokes the idea of poetic justice, where virtue is rewarded and vice is punished. But can such a sharp categorization really be applied on this complex novel? In the following paper I will show whether the term poetic justice can be applied on “Absalom, Absalom!”. I will take a look at the elements which might support this assumption by considering the characters’ development and function in the novel in order to show if they support the idea of punishment or reward. However, first of all I will take a closer look at the term poetic justice in general. I will give a definition, view its origins and examine its use in historical and recent context before applying it on Faulkner’s novel “Absalom, Absalom!”.
Download or read book Faulkner s Artistic Vision written by Ryūichi Yamaguchi and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although William Faulkner's imagination is often considered solely tragic, it actually blended what Faulkner himself called the bizarre and the terrible. Not only did Faulkner's vision encompass both comedy and tragedy; it perceived a latent humor in tragedy and vice versa. As a result, Faulkner's fiction is seldom simply comic or simply tragic. Faulkner's comedy incorporates tragedy and despair, and the humor in his novels may serve as well to intensify as to relieve a tragic or horrific effect. This study examines Faulkner's first nine novels, from Soldiers' Pay to Absalom, Absalom!, showing how humor is used to express theme: how it appears in the action, characters, and discourse of each novel; and how it contributes to the overall effect of each novel. In each case, even in the most pained and angry novels, Faulkner's practice of humor expresses his view that humor is an inseparable element of human experience. Ryuichi Yamaguchi is Professor of English and American literature at the Aichi University in Japan.
Download or read book Bloom s How to Write about William Faulkner written by Anna Priddy and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Faulkner is one of America's most highly regarded novelists. This title reveals his timeless novels and short stories, including The Sound and the Fury; Light in August; Go Down, Moses; As I Lay Dying; 'Absalom, Absalom ; Barn Burning; The Bear; and, A Rose for Emily.
Download or read book William Faulkner written by Henry Claridge and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1999 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection concentrates on earlier, less accessible material on Faulkner that will complement rather than duplicate existing library collections. Vol I: General Perspectives; Memories, Recollections and Interviews; Contemporary Political Opinion Vol II: Assessments on Individual Works: from Early Writings toAs I Lay Dying Vol III: Assessments on Individual Works: fromSanctuarytoGo Down Moses and Other Stories Vol IV: Assessments on Individual Works: from the Short Stories toThe Reivers; Faulkner and the South; Faulkner and Race; Faulkner and the French.
Download or read book New Essays on The House of Mirth written by Deborah Esch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-15 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, first published in 2001, makes distinctive claims for the historical, critical, and theoretical significance of Wharton's breakthrough work.
Download or read book William Faulkner written by John Bassett and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Faulkner (1897-1962). Writings include: Absolom, Absolom!, Intruder in the Dust, As I Lay Dying. Volume covers the period 1924-1957.
Download or read book Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature written by Matthew Smalley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-05-30 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With seemingly obsessive regularity, American authors, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, evoke the sermon at culturally loaded moments in their works, deploying the form to underscore the cultural work they imagine their novels or poetry to perform. Examining this longstanding tradition of literary preaching, this book draws on literary applications of design theory to provide a nuanced account of American literature's complex, anxious, and persistent engagement with the Protestant sermon. Analyzing literary preaching as a transhistorical form that simultaneously attracts and repels authors, Smalley demonstrates how major US writersRalph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrisonhave subverted the sermon's predominantly religious content in order to reimagine profound moments of reform in a political, cultural, and aesthetic mode. This study elucidates new lines of literary kinship, offers fresh readings of familiar works, and establishes literary preaching as an undertheorized but significant tradition in American literature.
Download or read book Faulkner s Narrative Poetics written by Arthur F. Kinney and published by Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 1978 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Weil's particular form of independent Marxism combined with a later turn to mysticism and religion provides a provocative tradition. Clearly an important work, the book should be part of any academic collection.' -Choice.
Download or read book William Faulkner in Context written by John T. Matthews and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-15 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Faulkner in Context explores the environment that conditioned Faulkner's creative work and offers readers a framework in which to better understand this challenging writer.
Download or read book Intruder in the Dust written by William Faulkner and published by Random House Canada. This book was released on 1964 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic Faulkner novel which explores the lives of a family of characters in the South. An aging black who has long refused to adopt the black's traditionally servile attitude is wrongfully accused of murdering a white woman.
Download or read book Faulkner s Imperialism written by Taylor Hagood and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Faulkner's Imperialism, Taylor Hagood explores two staples of Faulkner's world: myth and place. Using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the economic, sociological, and political factors in Faulkner's writing, he applies postcolonial theory, cultural materialism, and the work of the New Southernists to analyze the ways myth and place come together to encode narratives of imperialism -- and anti-imperialism -- in the worlds in which Faulkner lived and the one that he created. The resulting discussion highlights the deeply embedded imperial impulses underpinning not just Yoknapatawpha and Mississippi, but the Midwest, the Caribbean, France, and a host of often-overlooked corners of the Faulknerian map. Faulkner defines space in his fiction by creating places through culturally compelling narratives. Although these narrative spaces often have imperial roots, Hagood reveals how the oppressed can subvert these "mythic places" by turning the myths against their oppressors. The Greco-Roman myths long recognized as part of Faulkner's fictional world, for example, define racially hybrid spaces ostensibly designed to articulate white patriarchal narratives of imperial control but which actually carry within their very dreams of Arcady an anti-imperial narrative. In Faulkner's Mississippi Delta, which he modeled after the Nile Delta, plantation owners evoke the imperial power of ancient Egypt to confirm their own cultural ascendancy even while African Americans use biblical narratives of the Israelites enslaved in Egypt to speak against the power that controls them. Faulkner also used places he personally experienced -- such as New Orleans, a city that he recognized as containing multiple layers of imperial design -- to dramatize the constant struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed. Rather than reading the roles of myth and place according to conventional myth criticism or typical place models used by other Faulkner scholars, Hagood examines the intertextuality within Faulkner's writing, as well as the relationship of his writing to others' work, in an attempt to understand how the texts fit together and speak to one another. One of the few books that examine Faulkner's work as a whole, Faulkner's Imperialism moves beyond South-versus-North paradigms to encompass all the spaces within Faulkner's created cosmos, considering their interrelationships in a precise, holistic way.
Download or read book Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas written by Jay Watson and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2016-05-05 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Ted Atkinson, Thadious M. Davis, Matthew Dischinger, Dotty Dye, Chiyuma Elliott, Doreen Fowler, Joseph Fruscione, T. Austin Graham, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Derrick Harriell, Lisa Hinrichsen, Randall Horton, George Hutchinson, Andrew B. Leiter, John Wharton Lowe, Jamaal May, Ben Robbins, Tim A. Ryan, Sharon Eve Sarthou, Jenna Sciuto, James Smethurst, and Jay Watson At the turn of the millennium, the Martinican novelist Édouard Glissant offered the bold prediction that “Faulkner’s oeuvre will be made complete when it is revisited and made vital by African Americans,” a goal that “will be achieved by a radically ‘other’ reading.” In the spirit of Glissant’s prediction, this collection places William Faulkner’s literary oeuvre in dialogue with a hemispheric canon of black writing from the United States and the Caribbean. The volume’s seventeen essays and poetry selections chart lines of engagement, dialogue, and reciprocal resonance between Faulkner and his black precursors, contemporaries, and successors in the Americas. Contributors place Faulkner’s work in illuminating conversation with writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Randall Kenan, Edward P. Jones, and Natasha Trethewey, along with the musical artistry of Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton. In addition, five contemporary African American poets offer their own creative responses to Faulkner’s writings, characters, verbal art, and historical example. In these ways, the volume develops a comparative approach to the Faulkner oeuvre that goes beyond the compelling but limiting question of influence—who read whom, whose works draw from whose—to explore the confluences between Faulkner and black writing in the hemisphere.
Download or read book Faulkner s Questioning Narratives written by David L. Minter and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the core novels, including The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Sanctuary, Light in August 2003, and Go Down, Moses, David Minter illuminates Faulkner's mature fiction: the tensions at play within the fiction and the creativity not only exhibited by the author but also extended to his characters and required of his readers.Faulkner's achievement, Minter contends, was in combining daring experiments in form with searching examinations of grave social, political, and moral problems. His novels change and expand the role of the reader by means of proliferating narratives that lead to questions rather than answers and to approximation rather than resolution. Minter shows how this process at times implicates the reader in the corruption and violence of the story, as when the reader is required to fill in--out of his or her own experience--the crucial gaps left in the narrative of Sanctuary.Positioning Faulkner on the cusp between modernist and postmodernist writing, Minter shows how his methods undercut the self-contained exclusivity of the New Criticism by integrating the world of the novel with the reader's experience of history and culture.
Download or read book Twentieth Century Interpretations of Absalom Absalom written by Arnold Goldman and published by Prentice Hall. This book was released on 1971 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern literary critics analyze the style, content, and significance of Faulkner's well-known novel.
Download or read book In Faulkner s Shadow written by Lawrence Wells and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2020-08-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when you marry into a family that includes a Nobel Prize winner who is arguably the finest American writer of the twentieth century? Lawrence Wells, author of In Faulkner’s Shadow: A Memoir, fills this lively tale with stories that answer just that. In 1972, Wells married Dean Faulkner, the only niece of William Faulkner, and slowly found himself lost in the Faulkner mystique. While attempting to rebel against the overwhelming influence of his in-laws, Wells had a front-row seat to the various rivalries that sprouted between his wife and the members of her family, each of whom dealt in different ways with the challenges and expectations of carrying on a literary tradition. Beyond the family stories, Wells recounts the blossoming of a literary renaissance in Oxford, Mississippi, after William Faulkner’s death. Both the town of Oxford and the larger literary world were at a loss as to who would be Faulkner’s successor. During these uncertain times, Wells and his wife established Yoknapatawpha Press and the quarterly literary journal the Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review. In his dual role as publisher and author, Wells encountered and befriended Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Willie Morris, and many other writers. He became both participant and observer to the deeds and misdeeds of a rowdy collection of talented authors living in Faulkner’s shadow. Full of personal insights, this memoir features unforgettable characters and exciting behind-the-scene moments that reveal much about modern American letters and the southern literary tradition. It is also a love story about a courtship and marriage, and an ode to Dean Faulkner Wells and her family.
Download or read book The Saddest Words William Faulkner s Civil War written by Michael Gorra and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, in this reconsideration of Faulkner's life and legacy. William Faulkner, one of America’s most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance—his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South—demanding that we reevaluate the Nobel laureate’s life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon. Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words argues that even despite these contradictions—and perhaps because of them—William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner’s biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was “the South’s curse and its separate destiny,” a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South’s revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a “Lost Cause” romanticism not only defined Faulkner’s twentieth century but now even our own age. Through Gorra’s critical lens, Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America’s history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, “was” and “again.” Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that “the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning.” Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra’s travels through the South—including Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi—and commentaries on Faulkner’s fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.
