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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This thesis is concerned with Freud, Lacan and Faulkner's explorations of psychology and language, regarded as differential versions of common concerns. In the first part, using aspects of the Freudian concept of the unconscious, and reading Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness narrative in The Sound and the Fury, we find that Faulkner seeks to convey the flow of the unconscious. In the second part, we see that Lacan reads Freud through Saussure's linguistics, and renews Freudian psychoanalysis with the Lacanian concept of an unconscious structured like a language. Beyond Freud, with reference to these Lacanian notions, we find that Faulkner produces a narrative structured like a language. In the third part, through the application of Lacanian theories of narration to literary theories, and through a Barthes-inspired comparison of Faulkner's novel with Lu Xun's short story "A Madman's Diary", we see that while Lu Xun gives his readers a world of meaning, Faulkner shows them the world of the word without any meaning by creating a new narrative strategy.

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.

Collected Stories of William Faulkner, published in 1950 and awarded the National Book Award for Fiction in 1951, is more than an arbitrarily arranged selection of representative stories. Indeed, it is remarkably similar in form and theme to many of Faulkner's novels, especially Go Down, Moses, and can profitably be read as a unified work.Like Go Down, Moses, As I Lay Dying, Light in August and other Faulkner novels, Collected Stories is structured around a center, in this case a theme: the relationship between man and his environment. The six chapters of Collected Stories and the stories within each chapter are arranged in a "counterpointed" fashion; together, they offer myriad ways of looking at the central theme.Each chapter of the work is unified thematically, and each ultimately has relevance to the theme of man in relationship to his environment. "The Country" is set in ruralYoknapatawpha County and concerns the idea of self-assertion.