This dissertation means to examine Faulkner¡¦s Depression-Era fiction as a post-traumatic syndrome pervasive in the Southern psyche. I read Faulkner from a cultural triangulation of race, class, and gender in Yoknapatawpha. These triangular coordinates often close in on somewhere on the far horizon, in their relations with the Civil War and its aftermath. That is the way history insinuates herself into Faulkner¡¦s art. Opening with a chapter on The Sound and the Fury, I contend that the novel sets an eschatological scene for my investigation of its relation with the bulk of Faulkner¡¦s writing throughout the ¡¦30s. The Compsons¡¦ apocalyptic ¡§now,¡¨ 1929, is thoroughly checked for its temporal entanglement with the Confederate memories. How Faulkner¡¦s Great Depression contemporaneity laments over the Lost Cause gives us a topological context where the Confederate vestiges pop out at every corner. In Chapter two, I will slash vertically into white ideology for another visage of the white South¡¦s trauma¡Xa class-aware orchestration of monologues in the apocalyptical ¡§now.¡¨ Who lies dying is a self-consuming question among the Bundrens. This is where Faulkner comes closest to the socio-economic issue in the 30s. In the analysis of As I Lay Dying, I will engage with Diaspora theories of cultural displacement, along with a Marxist elucidation of ¡§structure of feeling¡¨ to fully denote the submerged living standards of the poor whites in the Depression Era. As for the third chapter, I will engage with the places in which the white Southern subjectivity itches¡Xrace and racism, and the dominant Yankee influence embodied by the Carpetbagger offspring Joanna Burden¡¦s unsuccessful taming of an ¡§interpellated¡¨ mulatto, Joe Christmas. The Diasporic depths in Faulkner¡¦s oeuvre carries on with all the cultural and identitarian others coming into the South to challenge the white supremacist in Light in August. Joe Christmas¡¦s wandering is not so much a victimization of racism, as he is a chameleon in identity relations inserted in a fanatical, politicized South¡Xa praxis around which different identities cite their own traumas. Moving from a vicarious way to retell the stories in a time of loss and upheaval, the fourth chapter touches the per se of the South¡¦s historical trauma, the defeat in the Civil War and its aftermath. I investigate two variants in the South¡¦s collective reproduction of this traumatic origin: Absalom, Absalom! with its gothic chronotope that runs parallel with the progressive modernity, i.e., the milieu of Quentin¡¦s apocalypse now; The Unvanquished with a deconstructive lens to look at the southern cavalier fatherhood, namely, Bayard Sartoris¡¦ rejection to avenge his father in its ¡§An Odor of Verbena.¡¨ The former rejects Anderson¡¦s ¡§homogeneous empty time¡¨ and the latter bids farewells to the Cavalier past by an overdose of romanticism and then an abrupt reversal at the apogee of the romantic vision. Concentrating on a self-therapeutic outlook on Faulkner and his South, I trace a symbolic economy of ¡§working through¡¨ in which Faulkner rehearses the Southern history by multiple overexposures of its trauma. It is also a project to tie Faulkner¡¦s own identity formation to a process of victimization in relation to these memories: his southern diasporic self in the 30s against the capitalistic centers of an intellectual New York and a commercial Hollywood. Faulkner embeds a humiliation in either vision. He is an epitome of the South¡¦s memories of loss and its concomitant pain.

In May 2016 Bear Family Records will release its third of three boxed sets documenting the three commercial location recording sessions conducted in east Tennessee during the years 1927-1930. Each of the three sessions was held in a different city by a different record company, and each was unique in terms of the specific musicians and types of music recorded; the three sessions had in common the fact that they were all conducted in east Tennessee and that they ultimately documented a broad range of the musical sounds, styles, and repertoire of Appalachia. More

The objective of this thesis is to explore how American authors represented poverty across different states during the Depression Era. I have chosen to review social reform author John Steinbeck, and proletariat authors, Michael Gold, Meridel Le Sueur, and William Attaway. Before addressing the issues presented in the data collection tools (novels): The Grapes of Wrath, Jews Without Money, The Girl, and Blood on the Forge, I reviewed the fundamentals of the events leading up to the crash of the stock market, which spiraled the United States and the world at large in the greatest Depression ever known. In this thesis, I have also outlined a summary of the novels for the benefit of readers who may not have had the opportunity to read them. I have applied a Marxist literary critical analysis to the preceding novels highlighting three overarching concepts of the theory: economic power, materialism versus spirituality, and class conflict. Evolving from these concepts are the key tenets of Marxism: base, superstructure, hegemony, commodification, class conflict, and false consciousness. In the literary critical analysis, I applied these key tenets to the plot of each novel in order to underscore the ideologies of Marxist theorists with regards to the existence of class divisions and how this division creates class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariats.