Author: Candace Waid Publisher: New Southern Studies ISBN: 9780820350554 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
"Waid presents a major new reading of Faulkner, his art, and his literary genealogy. Her goal is "to both reinscribe Faulkner in a tradition and to address the complex art found in his self-conscious riddles and signifying excesses." She begins by relocating his work within an American literary mainstream long dominated by women writers and writers of color. She then turns to the full spectrum of Faulkner's work in its relation to art and the artist: from the plethora of images connoting the crisis of creation and procreation to his use of pictorial forms, patterns of words, and word-shaped blank spaces to his intense engagement with abstract art, especially the paintings of Whistler and de Kooning. Waid argues that Faulkner had a pivotal influence on the origins of abstract expressionism and that his influence is seen most notably in the work of Willem de Kooning"--
Author: Ryūichi Yamaguchi Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press ISBN: 9780838640142 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
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.
Author: Peter Lurie Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421427559 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 254
Book Description
William Faulkner occupied a unique position as a modern writer. Although famous for his modernist novels and their notorious difficulty, he also wrote extensively for the "culture industry," and the works he produced for it—including short stories, adaptations, and screenplays—bore many of the hallmarks of consumer art. His experiences as a Hollywood screenwriter influenced him in a number of ways, many of them negative, while the films turned out by the "dream factories" in which he labored sporadically inspired both his interest and his contempt. Faulkner also disparaged the popular magazines—though he frequently sold short stories to them. To what extent was Faulkner's deeply ambivalent relationship to—and involvement with—American popular culture reflected in his modernist or "art" fiction? Peter Lurie finds convincing evidence that Faulkner was keenly aware of commercial culture and adapted its formulae, strategies, and in particular, its visual techniques into the language of his novels of the 1930s. Lurie contends that Faulkner's modernism can be best understood in light of his reaction to the popular culture of his day. Using Theodor Adorno's theory about modern cultural production as a framework, Lurie's close readings of Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem uncover the cultural history that surrounded and influenced the development of Faulkner's art. Lurie is particularly interested in the influence of cinema on Faulkner's fiction and especially the visual strategies he both deployed and critiqued. These include the suggestion of cinematic viewing on the part of readers and of characters in each of the novels; the collective and individual acts of voyeurism in Sanctuary and Light in August; the exposing in Absalom! Absalom! and Light in Augustof stereotypical and cinematic patterns of thought about history and race; and the evocation of popular forms like melodrama and the movie screen in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Offering innovative readings of these canonical works, this study sheds new light on Faulkner's uniquely American modernism.
Author: Kevin Railey Publisher: University of Alabama Press ISBN: 0817357270 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
Railey uses a materialist critical approach to argue that Faulkner'sobsession with history and his struggle with specific ideologies affecting southern society and his family guided his development as an artist. Faulkner may have written himself into history in a way that satisfied the image he had of himself as a natural, artistic aristocrat.
Author: Lothar Hönnighausen Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 1604736186 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 326
Book Description
That Faulkner was a “liar” not just in his writing but also in his life has troubled many critics. They have explained his numerous “false stories,” particularly those about military honors he actually never earned and war wounds he never sustained, with psychopathological imposture-theories. The drawback of this approach is that it reduces and oversimplifies the complex psychological and aesthetic phenomenon of Faulkner's role-playing. Instead, this critical study by one of the most acclaimed international Faulkner scholars takes its cue from Nietzsche's concept of “truth as a mobile army of metaphors” and from Ricoeur's dynamic view of metaphor and treats the wearing of masks not as an ontological issue but as a matter of discourse. Hönnighausen examines Faulkner's interviews and photographs for the fictions they perpetuate. Such Faulknerian role-playing he interprets as a mode of organizing experience and relates it to the crafting of the artist's various personae in his works. Mining metaphor as well as modern theories on social role-playing, Hönnighausen examines unexplored aspects of image creation and image reception in such major Faulkner novels as The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, A Fable, and Absalom, Absalom!
Author: Daniel Joseph Singal Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807864536 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 382
Book Description
Amid all that has been published about William Faulkner, one subject--the nature of his thought--remains largely unexplored. But, as Daniel Singal's new intellectual biography reveals, we can learn much about Faulkner's art by relating it to the cultural and intellectual discourse of his era, and much about that era by coming to terms with his art. Through detailed analyses of individual texts, from the earliest poetry through Go Down, Moses, Singal traces Faulkner's attempt to liberate himself from the repressive Victorian culture in which he was raised by embracing the Modernist culture of the artistic avant-garde. To accommodate the conflicting demands of these two cultures, Singal shows, Faulkner created a complex and fluid structure of selfhood based on a set of dual identities--one, that of a Modernist author writing on the most daring and subversive issues of his day, and the other, that of a southern country gentleman loyal to the conservative mores of his community. Indeed, it is in the clash between these two selves, Singal argues, that one finds the key to making sense of Faulkner.
Author: Peter Swiggart Publisher: University of Texas Press ISBN: 0292769377 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
To say that the entirety of human experience can be a novelist’s theme is to voice an absurdity. But, as Peter Swiggart convincingly argues, Faulkner’s work can be viewed as an extraordinary attempt to transform the panorama of man’s social experience into thematic material. Faulkner’s two-dimensional characters, his rhetorical circumlocutions, and his technical experiments are efforts to achieve a dramatic focus upon material too unwieldy, at least in principle, for any kind of fictional condensation. Faulkner makes use of devices of stylization that apply to virtually every aspect of his successful novels. For example, the complex facts of Southern history and culture are reduced to the scale of a simplified and yet grandiose social mythology: the degeneration of the white aristocracy, the rise of Snopesism, and the white Southerner’s gradual recognition of his latent sense of racial guilt. Within Faulkner’s fictional universe, human psychology takes the form of absolute distinctions between puritan and nonpuritan characters, between individuals corrupted by moral rationality and those who are simultaneously free of moral corruption and social involvement. In this way Faulkner is able to create the impression of a comprehensive treatment of important social concerns and universal moral issues. Like Henry James, he makes as much as he can of clearly defined dramatic events, until they seem to echo the potential complexity and depth of situations outside the realm of fiction. When this technique is successful the reader is left with the impression that he knows a Faulkner character far better than he could know an actual person. At the same time, the character retains the atmosphere of complexity and mystery imposed upon it by Faulkner’s handling of style and structure. This method of characterization reflects Faulkner’s simplifications of experience and yet suggests the inadequacy of any rigid interpretation of actual behavior. The reader is supplied with special eyeglasses through which the tragedy of the South, as well as humanity’s general inhumanity to itself, can be viewed in a perspective of simultaneous mystery and symbolic clarity.
Author: Candace Waid
Author: Ryūichi Yamaguchi
Author: John Wesley Hunt
Author: Clifford Lawrence Lewis
Author: Peter Lurie
Author: Kevin Railey
Author: Lothar Hönnighausen
Author: Daniel Joseph Singal
Author: Hiroyuki Koguchi
Author: Peter Swiggart