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This study of Faulkner's Go Down, Moses uses the reader-response theories of Wolfgang Iser to examine the affective impact of strategically-arranged folk conventions and mythopoeic devices upon a textually-based, white "civilized" reader. Using the devices of Southwestern humor, the trickster, and the tragic Black folk tale, "Was" through "Pantaloon in Black" repeatedly sidetrack the reader into unconscious participation in the white-code attitudes he was invited to criticize. When this hypocritical participation is discovered at certain "points of significance" in "The Fire and the Hearth" and "Pantaloon in Black," the reader's rationally-humanistic norms are rendered ineffectual, setting the stage for the undermining of a second idealism based on primitive myth. In "The Old People" and "The Bear" the reader is induced by mythopoeic devices to adopt Isaac McCaslin's unifying mythical norms and, thereby, to criticize his own failures in "Was" through "Pantaloon in Black" along with Southern civilization's socially-fragmenting rational-empiric concept of progress. "Delta Autumn," however, will undermine the reader's attempts to create moral unity using Isaac's natural hierarchy. With mythopoeic devices withdrawn, the wilderness destroyed by civilization, and Isaac McCaslin's reversion to white-code attitudes regarding Roth's Black/white offspring, the reader can see Isaac's experience in "The Bear" for what it really is, not an introduction into Sam Fathers's immutable cyclic unity but an initiation into fragmenting Cavalier forms and values. Once again the reader faces the hypocritical ineffectuality of his own idealism. For by emotionally and intellectually identifying with Isaac's misperception of the wilderness experience, he has aligned himself with socially-alienating rather than socially-unifying values. Now confronting the fragmentation dramatized in Isaac's terror-motivated racism and experienced in his own textual failures, the reader is ready for "the existential norm of "Go Down, Moses," where he is encouraged to construct meaning out of non-meaning by negating the "bad faith" of Gavin Stevens, who in fear chooses stable but racially-fragmenting Cavalier values, and by affirming the "good faith" of Molly Beauchamp and Miss Worsham, who choose the temporal unity of shared suffering in the face of chaos. / Department of English

This study compares fetishistic desires exhibited within Faulkner's fiction to the narrative strategies governing those texts. It surveys Faulkner's thematic and narrative experiments with fetishism from his first poems and sketches through his major novels. His early works, especially "Nympholepsy" and The Marble Faun, capture fetishistic moments of longing and lack of fulfillment, attraction and repulsion. Faulkner's novels, though, re-enact the dynamics of fetishism by means of their narrative strategies; thus, Faulkner achieves a correspondence between the fictional form and the fetish depicted. Because his texts engage us within their shifting temporality and symbolic repetitions, as readers we invariably fall prey to the fetishistic desires his narratives initiate and imitate. Interpretive problems necessarily arise concerning the reader's relationship to the text and desire for meaning. In As I Lay Dying, multiple points-of-view call our attention to the validity of interpretive perception; in Sanctuary, rape operates as Faulkner's master trope for both the characters' and reader's struggles for dominance; in Absalom, Absalom!, writing and reading history are obsessions shared by the narrators and the reader. My readings are informed by several interdisciplinary approaches to fetishism, such as: icon-worship and totemism from anthropology; object and linguistic substitutions from psychoanalysis; commodity exchange and reification from Marxist theories; and sign production and displacement from post-structuralism. Instead of imposing a general taxonomy for fetishism, I have allowed each text's narrative and thematic structures to guide my readings and, therefore, consciously matched my readings to the particular fetishes his narratives engender.

Issued also as Thesis--Mainz. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 154-158).

This study shows that William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses is a unified prose narrative. The various themes in this book are patterned so that they tie the work's seven chapters together into a coherent whole. Because of the thematic complexity of this book, only one set of themes, the acceptance or rejection of love and understanding, is examined. Characters demonstrate their acceptance of these values through their association with traditionally successful families. Characters reveal their rejection of these values through their association with unsuccessful families, if they are connected with families at all. Since literary criticism has no terminology for describing thematic patterning, this study employs terms used in musical composition. By constructing a model similar to the fugue form in music, we can show how the acceptance or rejection of love and understanding functions as one of the unifying elements in Go Down, Moses. The musical fugue has two parts, the exposition and the development. In the exposition, the fugue's major theme, called the subject, is introduced. In counterpoint to the subject, the fugue's minor theme, the countersubject, is also introduced. The full exploration of the subject and the countersubject's thematic possibilities is the province of the fugue's development. Between the sections of the development are short passages called episodes, in which portions of the subject and countersubject are used to shift the fugue's thematic emphasis. Finally, fugues often have a short, concluding section, the coda, in which there is a thematic summation. In the fugue-analog model for Go Down, Moses, the rejection of love and understanding corresponds to the subject, the major theme of the fugue. The acceptance of these values corresponds to the countersubject, the minor theme of the fugue. The fugal counterpoint is achieved through the actions of the book's characters in relation to successful and unsuccessful families. We can describe "Was," Chapter One of Go Down, Moses, as the exposition of the fugue-analog. The subject is developed through the actions of the McCaslin twins and Sophonsiba Beauchamp and through the initial three paragraph description of Isaac McCaslin. The countersubject appears through the actions of Tomey's Turl. "The Fire and the Hearth," Chapter Two, becomes the first section of the fugue-analog's development. The subject is seen through much of Lucas Beauchamp's activities as well as those of Roth Edmonds. The countersubject arises out of Lucas's loyalty to his family. This developmental section ends on the countersubject. "Pantaloon in Black," Chapter Three of Go Down, Moses, corresponds to the episode of the fugue-analog. Rider's strong attachment to his dead wife presents the countersubject, while the portrait of the marriage of the deputy sheriff develops the subject. The fugue-analog's episode shifts the thematic emphasis from countersubject to subject in preparation for the second section of development. The Isaac McCaslin chapters, "The Old People," "The Bear," and "Delta Autumn," are the fugue-analog's second development sections. Isaac's unsuccessful relations with his wife, his black cousins, and Cass Edmonds develop the subject, while Isaac's successful relationship with Sam Fathers presents the countersubject. The emphasis of this section of Go Down, Moses is on the subject. The book ends with "Go Down, Moses," the last chapter, which corresponds to the fugue-analog's coda. By ending with the description of the successful "family" of Miss Worsham and Molly Beauchamp, Go Down, Moses ends on the countersubject.

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Most critical acclaim of William Faulkner has focused on his innovations of narrative technique, and while critics have frequently noted the correlation between form and meaning in his novels, the central focus of these novels--race--has largely been ignored in the criticism. The purpose of this paper is to examine Faulkner's narrative methodology and arrangement of material in order to demonstrate that the structures of his novels, particularly Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!, consistently enhance and dramatize the major subject and themes of the novels. Under careful scrutiny, these structures reveal an effective and dramatic parallel between Faulkner's rhetorical methodology and the complexity of his subject matter--the South, and the issue of race.

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