Absalom, Absalom! presents the voices of a series of characters who suffer crises when they discover the meaning in other characters' languages or voices to be different from their own. This difference creates an aporia (a radical doubt, a sense of loss of familiar meaning) which disrupts the listening individual's sense of his or her previously 'unified' self. I show that these characters in Faulkner's novel do not have unified voices; their narratives develop as repetitions of the crisis moment when another's voice influenced their way of relating to themselves through language. / I also show that the crisis of meaning that characters in the book experience is enacted on another level. A difficult book to read because of its many textual figures of doubt, Absalom may be said to generate a crisis of interpretation in its readers. This thesis offers a way of reading the text which explores the various potential meanings of these aporias in the novel's discursive surface, and so avoids the experience of crisis, of anxiety. This method of reading is based on the mode of reading exemplified by one of the text's own characters: Shreve McCannon, who is not discouraged by the fact that neither the narratives he hears nor the speculative, hypothetical narratives he produces in response make complete and coherent sense of everything.

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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.

Thesis(M.A.)--Auburn University, 2006. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographic references.

In this essay I employ memory theories to examine Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. How are the memories depicted and how do they function in the novel? What are the characters 'allowed' to remember? Scholars that have written about William Faulkners usage of memories and narrative time in his novels, often claim that they together represent and create a sense of determinism and/or fatalism. Even though I agreed with that opinion, regarding time and memory in a lot of Faulkners novels, I wondered if these features in the text might not represent/mean something more, beyond that. One scholar have expressed the view that William Faulkners characters resemble blind marionettes of Destiny. I instead claim that the characters themselves, via their individual memories and temporal relations, create an internal determinism, connected with cultural memory, norms and traditions. I try to examine both the individual memories, as depicted in the novel, and the novel in its entirety, using different memory theories and narratology.

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.

William Faulkner is famous for stating he agrees with Henri Bergson's optimistic philosophy of time, a philosophy that emphasizes human freedom and action precisely as they relate to time. However, many of Faulkner's characters are defined by their stagnant and lethargic personalities which cannot change; these characters are held immobile by an over – identification with the rich history of their mythic, southern past. This paper, through in depth explorations of Faulkner's masterpieces, Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and The Fury seeks to consider human mythmaking as the key to understanding Faulkner's difficult works. This critical approach allows us to better understand these works as conflicts between diachronic (linear or "normal") time and synchronic time (mythological or circular) time or more simply conflicts between the brute, inexorable world of fact and the human, meaning making world that is often a specious undermining of reality and change.

"The Journey Within" deals with how the receiver (reader/viewer) engages with the novel and the film. The thesis primarily focuses on Faulkner's novel, incorporating Persona largely as a means by which to illustrate the more carefully concealed reader-engagement strategies in Absalom, Absalom! Starting with a review of Faulkner criticism that opens itself up to this inquiry, the thesis leads into a detail study of the engagement strategies used to foster identification, alignment, sympathy, and empathy among receivers. Employing Umberto Eco's criticism involving "Model Readers" who "actualize" texts, as well as other reader and viewer response theory, I demonstrate that certain receivers experience a specific, heightened engagement with the work. This "Model" receiver restructures her ideologies to accord with what the work expects from her. Ultimately, this particular engagement leads to ontological participation in the work among its receivers. Martin Heidegger's phenomenological investigation, Being and Time, helps illustrate this ontological participation.

This study defines and applies a theory of tragedy which is based on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. In the first chapter the writer argues for the need of a widely accepted theory of tragedy and show that we do not presently have one. In the same chapter, the writer presents the theory that tragedy is a very specific art type which transcends genre and which is the product of a synthesis of the Dionysiac and Apollonian forces in Western culture. The writer argues that by understanding the philosophical and aesthetic nature of the forces as they are expressed in tragedy we can isolate and define the essential elements of tragedy. Tragedy must have a person of heroic stature as its main protagonist. It must have a specific kind of plot in which a reversal of the hero's experience of the universe occurs. It must have a choric element, which is a combination of two components: communality and lyricism. Finally, tragedy must contain a mythic background which allows for the expression of two themes, the Dionysiac theme and the Apollonian theme.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第17965号 / 人博第661号 / 新制||人||159(附属図書館) / 25||人博||661(吉田南総合図書館) / 30795 / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生人間学専攻 / (主査)教授 水野 尚之, 教授 廣野 由美子, 准教授 小島 基洋 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DFAM