The conclusion drawn from this study is that the arrangement of material in Absalom, Absalom! is unified and purposeful. The structure evokes that despair that is the common denominator of mankind. It reveals both the bond between men and the separation of men; and though some of the most dramatic episodes in the novel picture the union of men in brotherly love, most of the material and certainly the arrangement of the material emphasize the estrangement of men. In addition, by juxtaposing chapters, each separated from the others by its own structural and thematic qualities, Faulkner places a burden of interpretation on the reader suggestive of the burden of despair that overwhelms the protagonists of the novel.

Lai, Jing Yee. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-94). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter One --- p.16 / Chapter Two --- p.41 / Chapter Three --- p.60 / Conclusion --- p.87 / Works Cited --- p.90 / Additional Bibliography --- p.92

Comme les Montaigne, les Pascal, les Nietzsche ou les Cioran, Bataille a écrit dans l'interstice qui lie et sépare l'écrivain, le savant et le philosophe. Comme eux, il a déployé une langue, parmi les plus belles qui soient, mais surtout, il a inquiété son époque, qui demeure en grande partie la nôtre, en maintenant au cœur de son écriture le supplice de la question. Question béante s'il en est, infiniment ouverte, mais pas forcément ni uniquement à la manière provocante d'une plaie ou d'une vulve. Question ouverte, cette fois-ci, non plus seulement sur la noire intériorité de cet étrange mystique « défroqué » qu'a été Bataille, mais aussi et principalement sur le monde immense et diversement coloré qui a fait de Bataille cet esprit si singulier. Car, Bataille était certes un comprachicos, mais les verrues qu'il cultivait sur son visage étaient avant tout celles de ses semblables, c'est-à-dire de l'humanité. Nous aurons donc l'occasion de voir quelle gaya scienza, quelle scienza nuova, quelle science vive Bataille a mise au point pour échapper à la disjonction et à l'isolement des idées éparpillées dans les différentes sciences, ainsi que pour redécouvrir la complexité de l'univers et sa complicité avec l'espèce humaine. En portant un regard qui se souhaite détaché de toute approche mimétique et/ou révérencieuse, nous avons voulu explorer trois grands discours, au sens de Michel Foucault, qui irriguent l'œuvre de Bataille, parfois de façon souterraine. Quels liens Bataille percevait-t-il entre la nature et la culture, et quelle est l'histoire de cette conception dans son œuvre ? Comment, à travers les généalogies du corps humain et du corps social, du paléolithique au vingtième siècle, Bataille a-t-il lu le rôle fondateur de l'art pour les sociétés humaines ? Et enfin, quelle épistémologie de la connaissance a permis à Bataille de progresser sans croître dans sa recherche inspirée, et d'y mêler savoir et « non-savoir », science et mystique ? / The abstract is available in French only

"The Religious Dimensions of William Faulkner: An Inquiry into the Dichotomy of Puritanism" traces a secular mode of thinking of American moral superiority and the gospel of success to its religious origins. The study shows that while the basis for American moral superiority derives from the typological correspondence between sacred history and American experience, the gospel of success results from the Puritan preoccupation with work as a virtue instead of a necessity because labor improves one's lot in this world while securing salvation in the next. By explaining how Puritanism begins as a rejection of worldliness but ends as an orgy of materialism, my study raises and addresses the paradoxical nature of the Puritan legacy: Why should the Puritan work ethic, when subverted by its logical conclusion---the gospel of success, result in the undoing of Puritan spirituality in its mission of redeeming the Old World? Furthermore, this inquiry examines the role Puritanism plays in creating the mythologies of America as the New World Garden, the white man as the American Adam, the black man as the American Ham, and the white woman as the American Eve. In the Puritan use of biblical typology, blacks and women function as the white men's servants and helpmates and, as such, have only adjunctive value to the white men's moral vision of the New Canaan and their economic pursuit of an earthly paradise. Since the racist and sexist discourse of Adamic self-creation predominates the American Dream, blacks and women become part of, rather than owner of, that dream. Basing my analysis on his three major novels, I demonstrate William Faulkner's penetrating insight into the dilemmas and ramifications of Puritanism in his critique of the American gospel of success in general and the Southern gospels of racism and sexism in particular. My conception of Puritanism in dichotomous tension, paradigmatically proposed as the American Adam turned Franklinesque self-made man, sheds new light on Faulkner's fictional characters as victims of the Puritan moral ambiguities.

The aim of this study is not to explain Juan Rulfo in the light of William Faulkner, although the latter's influence among Spanish American writers is unquestionable. Rather, I propose to specifically examine Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Rulfo's Pedro Paramo in comparative terms, since both novels are about the conflict between human desire and reality: they deal with longings, particularly those of Thomas Sutpen and Pedro Paramo, which never achieve ultimate satisfaction, in spite of these central characters' overwhelming and obsessive will to power which creates Sutpen's Hundred and Comala in the image of each protagonist. Each character tries to assume the omnipotence of a god, once his unthinking participation in the existential reality has been destroyed by chance traumatic occurrences. Comparable metamorphic organizing images exist in the two novels: a square and a circle. They represent the protagonists' conception of a protected space/world with an illusory center, born out of desire and representing an ideal which would render meaningful Sutpen's and Paramo's existence. The heart of Sutpen's dream is an heir to continue his dynasty and Paramo is haunted by the idealized Susana whom he claims to be the reason of all his actions. However, the two fabricated worlds are eventually revealed as fictions, and the centers of both structures collapse into the dust of reality. What remains of the two protagonists is only a motionless marble tombstone in a decayed plantation and a crumbled heap of stones in a moribund village. The inheritors of the two worlds are a mulatto idiot and an incestuous couple. After commenting on some critical opinions of the two novels and their protagonists, I trace the conception, the workings, and the collapse, with its consequences, of the two worlds of desire. I follow an approximately chronologial order, although the two texts are anything but chronological.

In William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels, a group of characters exists who possess three common characteristics--a closeness to mankind, a realization of the tragedy in life, and a positive response to this tragedy. The term beneficent is used to describe the twenty individuals who possess these traits. The characters are divided into two broad categories. The first includes the white and black primitives who innately possess beneficent qualities. The term primitive describes the individual who exhibits three additional traits--simplicity, nonintellectualism, and closeness to nature. The second group includes characters who must learn the attributes of beneficence in the course of the novel. All the beneficent characters serve as embodiments of the optimism found in Faulkner's fiction.

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This thesis examines eight novels by William Faulkner by means of a critical method based on a concept of landscape. The thesis developed out of a curiosity regarding the vivid pictures that Faulkner's novels evoked in the mind of this reader. These reminded the reader of pictures similar in their vividness to those evoked in childhood by fairy tales and children's literature. In the main, here, ` the vivid Faulknemian pictures are examined from a moral point of view. The critical method follows from the idea of the literary landscape as a holistic entity, 'a prospect such as may be taken in at a glance from one point of view'. The method operates in three stages, and the vivid pictures found in the landscapes of the novels are deemed to function as centres of particular interest. In the first stage of the method, an impressionistic landscape, so called, is established, based on the facts of place, time, society, events and values given in or deducible from the novel. The vivid pictures are noted. The second stage calls for the quantification of the author's technical strategies, and in the third stage the vivid pictures are adopted as the starting points for detailed analyses of one or more aspects of the novel. The method seems to bring into focus a mature, detailed and satisfying reader's landscape which, it is hoped, functions as an R accurate reflection of the author's literary creation.

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