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Esta dissertação focaliza dois textos do escritor William Faulkner, considerado pela crítica como um dos expoentes das experimentações modernistas. O primeiro a ser estudado aqui é A Rose for Emily, uma short story publicada em 1930; o segundo é Absalom, Absalom!, um romance de 1936. O objetivo é investigar se no trabalho de Faulkner pode ser encontrado um narrador por excelência, partindo do conceito apresentado por Walter Benjamin em seu estudo The storyteller: reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov. Minha proposta é levantar a questão do fim da comunicabilidade da experiência do narrador para então sugerir que, ao contrário do que Benjamin afirma, a arte de narrar não chegou ao fim. Meu argumento é de que as narrativas de Faulkner evidenciam sua arte de narrar imbricada com seu uso de ponto de vista. A experiência e a experimentação de Faulkner enquanto escritor são investigadas neste trabalho, principalmente sua manipulação do uso de ponto de vista, e são analisadas à luz de conceitos desenvolvidos por Walter Benjamin, Wayne Booth, Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal, entre outros. Os resultados desta pesquisa destacam que o trabalho de Faulkner com ponto de vista pode ser considerado muito mais que um mero experimento modernista, pois sua experiência como escritor proveniente do Sul dos Estados Unidos tem impacto nessa experimentação. A memória individual e coletiva, a transmissão de experiência, o contar e o recontar de histórias dos narradores, são fatores importantes para a construção de significado nas narrativas estudadas. Além disso, ao discutir a significação de sua obra, tanto no aspecto formal quanto no aspecto relativo ao contexto geográfico e literário de seu tempo e lugar, espero contribuir com mais um olhar sobre as estratégias narrativas de Faulkner, escritor que, ainda hoje, fomenta investigação e produção acadêmica significativa, justamente por conseguir construir círculos narrativos que apresentam narradores por excelência. / This thesis brings into focus two texts by William Faulkner, a writer who has been praised as one of the exponents at modernist experimentations. The first one to be studied here is A Rose for Emily, a short story published in 1930; the second is Absalom, Absalom!, a novel from 1936. The objective is to investigate whether a genuine storyteller can be found in Faulkner‘s work, supported by the concept presented by Walter Benjamin in his essay The storyteller: reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov. My aim is to raise the question of the end of communicability of experience in order to suggest that, contrary to what Benjamin affirms, the art of storytelling has not reached its end. My argument is that Faulkner‘s narratives evidence his storytelling art as being imbricated with his use of point of view. Faulkner‘s experience and experimentation as a writer are investigated here, principally his manipulation with the use of point of view, and they are analyzed in the light of the concepts developed by Walter Benjamin, Wayne Booth, Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal, and others. The results of this research highlight that Faulkner‘s work with point of view is to be considered much more than merely a modernist experimentation, because his experience as a writer from the South of the United States has impact on this experimentation. Individual and collective memory, transmission of experience, narrators telling and retelling stories, are important factors for the construction of meaning in the narratives studied here. Moreover, by discussing the meaningfulness of his work, whether in its formal aspect or in the aspect related to the geographic and literary context of its time and place, I expect to contribute with yet another look into the narrative strategies employed by Faulkner, a writer that, still today, fosters academic investigation and production, exactly for being able to construct telling circles that present genuine storytellers.

Esta dissertação focaliza dois textos do escritor William Faulkner, considerado pela crítica como um dos expoentes das experimentações modernistas. O primeiro a ser estudado aqui é A Rose for Emily, uma short story publicada em 1930; o segundo é Absalom, Absalom!, um romance de 1936. O objetivo é investigar se no trabalho de Faulkner pode ser encontrado um narrador por excelência, partindo do conceito apresentado por Walter Benjamin em seu estudo The storyteller: reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov. Minha proposta é levantar a questão do fim da comunicabilidade da experiência do narrador para então sugerir que, ao contrário do que Benjamin afirma, a arte de narrar não chegou ao fim. Meu argumento é de que as narrativas de Faulkner evidenciam sua arte de narrar imbricada com seu uso de ponto de vista. A experiência e a experimentação de Faulkner enquanto escritor são investigadas neste trabalho, principalmente sua manipulação do uso de ponto de vista, e são analisadas à luz de conceitos desenvolvidos por Walter Benjamin, Wayne Booth, Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal, entre outros. Os resultados desta pesquisa destacam que o trabalho de Faulkner com ponto de vista pode ser considerado muito mais que um mero experimento modernista, pois sua experiência como escritor proveniente do Sul dos Estados Unidos tem impacto nessa experimentação. A memória individual e coletiva, a transmissão de experiência, o contar e o recontar de histórias dos narradores, são fatores importantes para a construção de significado nas narrativas estudadas. Além disso, ao discutir a significação de sua obra, tanto no aspecto formal quanto no aspecto relativo ao contexto geográfico e literário de seu tempo e lugar, espero contribuir com mais um olhar sobre as estratégias narrativas de Faulkner, escritor que, ainda hoje, fomenta investigação e produção acadêmica significativa, justamente por conseguir construir círculos narrativos que apresentam narradores por excelência. / This thesis brings into focus two texts by William Faulkner, a writer who has been praised as one of the exponents at modernist experimentations. The first one to be studied here is A Rose for Emily, a short story published in 1930; the second is Absalom, Absalom!, a novel from 1936. The objective is to investigate whether a genuine storyteller can be found in Faulkner‘s work, supported by the concept presented by Walter Benjamin in his essay The storyteller: reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov. My aim is to raise the question of the end of communicability of experience in order to suggest that, contrary to what Benjamin affirms, the art of storytelling has not reached its end. My argument is that Faulkner‘s narratives evidence his storytelling art as being imbricated with his use of point of view. Faulkner‘s experience and experimentation as a writer are investigated here, principally his manipulation with the use of point of view, and they are analyzed in the light of the concepts developed by Walter Benjamin, Wayne Booth, Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal, and others. The results of this research highlight that Faulkner‘s work with point of view is to be considered much more than merely a modernist experimentation, because his experience as a writer from the South of the United States has impact on this experimentation. Individual and collective memory, transmission of experience, narrators telling and retelling stories, are important factors for the construction of meaning in the narratives studied here. Moreover, by discussing the meaningfulness of his work, whether in its formal aspect or in the aspect related to the geographic and literary context of its time and place, I expect to contribute with yet another look into the narrative strategies employed by Faulkner, a writer that, still today, fosters academic investigation and production, exactly for being able to construct telling circles that present genuine storytellers.

Esta dissertação focaliza dois textos do escritor William Faulkner, considerado pela crítica como um dos expoentes das experimentações modernistas. O primeiro a ser estudado aqui é A Rose for Emily, uma short story publicada em 1930; o segundo é Absalom, Absalom!, um romance de 1936. O objetivo é investigar se no trabalho de Faulkner pode ser encontrado um narrador por excelência, partindo do conceito apresentado por Walter Benjamin em seu estudo The storyteller: reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov. Minha proposta é levantar a questão do fim da comunicabilidade da experiência do narrador para então sugerir que, ao contrário do que Benjamin afirma, a arte de narrar não chegou ao fim. Meu argumento é de que as narrativas de Faulkner evidenciam sua arte de narrar imbricada com seu uso de ponto de vista. A experiência e a experimentação de Faulkner enquanto escritor são investigadas neste trabalho, principalmente sua manipulação do uso de ponto de vista, e são analisadas à luz de conceitos desenvolvidos por Walter Benjamin, Wayne Booth, Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal, entre outros. Os resultados desta pesquisa destacam que o trabalho de Faulkner com ponto de vista pode ser considerado muito mais que um mero experimento modernista, pois sua experiência como escritor proveniente do Sul dos Estados Unidos tem impacto nessa experimentação. A memória individual e coletiva, a transmissão de experiência, o contar e o recontar de histórias dos narradores, são fatores importantes para a construção de significado nas narrativas estudadas. Além disso, ao discutir a significação de sua obra, tanto no aspecto formal quanto no aspecto relativo ao contexto geográfico e literário de seu tempo e lugar, espero contribuir com mais um olhar sobre as estratégias narrativas de Faulkner, escritor que, ainda hoje, fomenta investigação e produção acadêmica significativa, justamente por conseguir construir círculos narrativos que apresentam narradores por excelência. / This thesis brings into focus two texts by William Faulkner, a writer who has been praised as one of the exponents at modernist experimentations. The first one to be studied here is A Rose for Emily, a short story published in 1930; the second is Absalom, Absalom!, a novel from 1936. The objective is to investigate whether a genuine storyteller can be found in Faulkner‘s work, supported by the concept presented by Walter Benjamin in his essay The storyteller: reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov. My aim is to raise the question of the end of communicability of experience in order to suggest that, contrary to what Benjamin affirms, the art of storytelling has not reached its end. My argument is that Faulkner‘s narratives evidence his storytelling art as being imbricated with his use of point of view. Faulkner‘s experience and experimentation as a writer are investigated here, principally his manipulation with the use of point of view, and they are analyzed in the light of the concepts developed by Walter Benjamin, Wayne Booth, Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal, and others. The results of this research highlight that Faulkner‘s work with point of view is to be considered much more than merely a modernist experimentation, because his experience as a writer from the South of the United States has impact on this experimentation. Individual and collective memory, transmission of experience, narrators telling and retelling stories, are important factors for the construction of meaning in the narratives studied here. Moreover, by discussing the meaningfulness of his work, whether in its formal aspect or in the aspect related to the geographic and literary context of its time and place, I expect to contribute with yet another look into the narrative strategies employed by Faulkner, a writer that, still today, fosters academic investigation and production, exactly for being able to construct telling circles that present genuine storytellers.

Critical reactions to the religious experiences contained in William Faulkner's fiction have tended to fall within the context of traditional Christian belief systems. In most instances, the characters' beliefs have been judged by the tenets of belief systems or religions that are not necessarily those on which the characters base their lives. There has been no effort to understand the characters' spirituality as the basis of an independent religious belief system. Mircea Eliade's methods and models in the study of comparative religion, in particular his explanation of the interaction of the sacred and the profane during a hierophany (the manifestation of the sacred), can be applied to the belief systems of Faulkner's characters to reveal the theologies of the characters' religions, the nature of the belief systems on which they base their lives. Identification of those stories associated with hierophanies in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction enables the isolation and analysis of the sacred stories and sacraments of Yoknapatawpha County's civil religion. The storytellings examined appear in Flags in the Dust, "A Justice," and Absalom, Absalom!. The storytellers and the audiences are all a part of the Yoknapatawpha community, and the stories are drawn from a common history. The sacralization and use of particular stories to explain certain events reflects the faith life of the community as a whole, as well as that of the individual participating in the ritual. The explication of the profane experiences the myths are meant to sanctify will reveal that the individuals, and consequently, the community, are in the process of discarding their old, civil religion. As a result, they have lost the ability to adapt their ancestral myths to fit the existential crises they presently face. Unable to infuse the present with the sacred, Yoknapatawpha1s younger generation is overwhelmed by the chaos that surrounds it.

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This dissertation demonstrates that irrationality in representative modernist novels is a significant and valuable feature of subjectivity. Building on contemporary theories of the novel, the thesis develops two closely related issues: the novel as an aesthetic vehicle of subjectivity and the novel as a reflection of its socio-historical moment. In major novels by William Faulkner, Hermann Broch, and Virginia Woolf a surrender to irrationality is paradoxically portrayed as a positive act which can contribute to a more complete fulfilment of the self. Furthermore, twentieth century notions of the self are often expanded, complicated, or revised at least in part through the genre of the novel which is used to represent them. / In three main chapters, the thesis draws an original link between studies of the novel as genre on the one hand, and explorations of the meaning of irrationality in early twentieth century fiction on the other. The first on Faulkner includes a section outlining my research into the theoretical domain of subjectivity, irrationality, modernism, and the novel which serves as a background for Faulkner, but remains pertinent also to the chapters on Broch and Woolf which follow. With reference to recent social theorists, philosophers of the novel, medical researchers, and literary critics, the dissertation establishes that Faulkner Broch, and Woolf construct works which advance the notion that irrationality can be conducive to the development of an autonomous, private self which is actively engaged in the outside world. Moreover, in each of the novels at the centre of this study, irrational characters personify an aspect of the novel which is essential to the structural development of the genre. / Key works by Faulkner, Broch, and Woolf insist that irrationality is at the core of a dynamic and modernist representation of identity. In novels by Faulkner, irrationality contributes to a flexible sense of time and to the elaboration of a valuable intersubjective communication. In Broch's trilogy, an irrational approach to reality encourages the development of a temporal, ethical, and subjective freedom. For Woolf, the validation of irrational impulses restrains a compulsive and debilitating drive towards introspection and facilitates social interaction.

This thesis argues that the popular characterization of high modernist fiction as esoteric, elitist, uncommunicative, and far too difficult for the common reader obscures the democratic principles at the heart of modernist experimentation and its poetics of difficulty. Recent theories of embodied cognition when applied to representative examples of high modernist novels help dispel the myth of inaccessibility and reveal the many ways in which these works actually accommodate the common reader. Once the stigma of inaccessibility is removed from the study of modernist novels, it becomes possible to see how their formal experiments with language as well as the themes and issues they contain operate for readers and writers alike as a means of exploring everyday cognitive activities and responses. To this end, the concept of cognitive dissonance provides a heuristic device for understanding what lies behind the motivations of writers who aestheticise experiences of dissonance in their texts and the responses of readers who confront these texts. This cognitive approach to modern literature challenges assumptions about high modernism's "uncompromising intellectuality" and replaces them with a view of modernism that is more accessible and inclusive without diminishing its radical difficulty. It also paves the way for new readings of highly canonical modernist fiction. For instance, I examine how James Joyce places "inscribed" readers into Ulysses to guide actual readers through some of the difficulties of the novel. I then read William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury as a novel that both thematises and formally resists the modern threat of behaviouristic human conditioning. Finally, I look at how the theme and form of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway reinforce the embodied equation of dissonance with illness and incompletion.

The three novels discussed in this essay avoid the abstraction of ideology without resorting to oversimplification. William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man are, among other things, the presentation of character in context. In chapters two, three, and four, I consider consecutively the character structures of the protagonists of the three novels in terms of the interaction between the individuals and the communally prescribed character structures of the traditional South which form their context. With Addie Bundren, Faulkner exemplifies the southerner's preference for stable, primary-colored individuality over the more mobile, versatile, inclusive "individuation" to which he objects because, from his traditional viewpoint, it leaves the individual isolated and alienated with no way of relating his world to the necessarily divergent worlds around him and no way of coping adequately with unforseen human events. Inheriting negation in place of tradition, Addie's death and burial leave the family in a bestially primitive state, existing without benefit of the accumulated experience of history. The traditional society, however, is not the only one that utilizes the experience of past generations. A perspective of the values and limitations of a family living according to southern traditions as it faces changes in conflict with its "individuated" members provides a literary view of the workings of a traditional milieu from the inside in Delta Wedding. Welty intimates that real life--the spontaneous action and reaction of an "individuated" being to present phenomena--is more powerful than the restraining and, because dated, erroneous traditions surrounding it. The protagonist of Ellison's Invisible Man moves from a culturally prescribed "preconsciousness" to the furthest extremes of "individuation". The acceptable ways of being black in the South offer so little possibility for the black man that his entire environment can be seen as a maze of traps placed by the culture between the individual and what twentieth-century democratic thought has come to define as basic human freedom. Falling first into the hands of racists, then paternalists, and finally--the most subtle trap of all--the complex and contradictory concepts of the nature of the black man as conceived by southern black men themselves, the Invisible Man exposes as he experiences the primary facets of southern racism. Breaking through these traditions, the Invisible Man does not attempt to become a white man with a black skin, but locates those elements of his black culture that are viable within the larger perspective of his liberated consciousness. Finally, Ellison posits the need for an "individuated" personality as prerequisite to the naming of the reality that forms its context. And, as Faulkner has shown with Addie Bundren, individuated being has insufficient scope for meeting existential exigencies if it is formed without the positive tensions of a broader than individual view--what Ellison calls "myth". As Welty shows, the southern myth is insufficiently inclusive to allow for universal survival through diversified compatibility. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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