This dissertation reconsiders the relationship between fiction and slavery in American literary culture. “Prisoners of Style” shows how writers from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, including Hannah Crafts, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and William Faulkner, wrestled with enslavement. They found it not only a subject to be written about, but also a problem of characterization. Slavery and the ontological sorcery through which it produced a new kind of individual—the individual who is also a thing—led these authors to rethink basic formal assumptions about realist fiction, especially about what constitutes a literary character. The writers I discuss did not set out to argue for the slave’s humanity or to render her interiority, but instead sought to represent the systematic unmaking of black personhood perpetrated by the laws and institutions that governed chattel slavery in the US. They set out to reveal the ideological violence perpetrated against enslaved blacks, and they did so by writing characters who embodied the categorical uncertainty of the slave, characters who were not allegories for real, full people. The tradition of writing I describe does not represent the fullness of enslaved “persons”; instead it renders something far more abstract: the epistemology that undergirded enslavement—those patterns of thought that preconditioned slavery itself. The authors I study understood fictionality as a thorny ethical, epistemological, and political problem. In my chapter on Crafts, for example, I look at The Bondwoman’s Narrative alongside a set of non-fiction texts about Jane Johnson, the slave who preceded her in John Hill Wheeler’s household. Reading the novel against legal documents, pamphlets, and histories about Johnson and her escape from Wheeler, the chapter explores what fiction could do that these other modes of writing could not. In moments of sleep, amnesia, and daydreaming, Crafts resists the normative logic of subjecthood and individual rights that underpins the representations of Johnson. In the second half of the project, I demonstrate the significance of fictionality to American literary realism’s evolution into modernism. The final chapter, on Faulkner, places two of his Yoknapatawpha novels within the context of his interest in modernist painting and sculpture. Work by Picasso, Matisse, and other visual artists inspired his concern with surfaces and flatness, leading to a meditation on artifice that runs throughout his major novels. I argue that his flatness—his insistence on the non-referential quality of fiction—is crucial for understanding his characterization and philosophy of history history, in particular the history of Southern plantation slavery.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

Since Presocratic Greece, suicide in the West has been “known” and controlled, both politically and discursively. Groups as diverse as theologians and literary critics have propagated many different views of self-killing, but, determining its cause and moralizing about it, they have commonly exerted interpretive power over suicide, making it nameable, explicable, and predominantly reprehensible. The four modernist authors that I consider in this dissertation -- Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner -- break completely with the tradition of knowing suicide by insisting on its inscrutability, refusing to judge it, and ultimately rendering it “almost unnamable,” identifiable but indefinable. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Victory, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Sound and the Fury, respectively, these authors portray illustrative, but by no means definitive, modernist self-killings; they construct a distinctive representational space around suicide, one free of causal, moral, theoretical or thematic meaning and, I argue, imbued with the power to disrupt interpretation. “‘Almost Unnamable’: Suicide in the Modernist Novel” examines the power of self-killing’s representational space in early twentieth-century fiction, arguing for its importance not only to the history of suicide in the West but also to the portrayal of death in the twentieth-century novel. / text

Este trabalho é dedicado à análise de duas obras ficcionais, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, de Zora Neale Hurston, e “Light in August”, de William Faulkner. O ponto de partida da análise é a ideia que identidades são construídas de acordo com injunções discursivas específicas, que variam de contexto para contexto. Para tanto, foram analisados os dois personagens principais dos textos, Janie Crawford, uma mulher negra, e Joe Christmas, um homem cuja identidade racial é desconhecida. A comparação entre os dois se baseou na forma como ambas as identidades são construídas nos romances, em relação ao seu acesso à língua e a possibilidade de articulação dentro dela, e ao contexto no qual estão inseridos. / This research is dedicated to the analysis of two fictional works, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston and Light in August (1932) by William Faulkner. The starting point of the analysis is the idea that identities are constructed according to specific discursive injunctions, which vary from context to context. The study is focused on the main characters of both novels, Janie Crawford, a black woman, and Joe Christmas, a man whose racial identity is unknown. The comparison between the two characters is based on how their identities are constructed in the novels in relation to their access to language and their possibility of articulating within it, and the context in which they are inserted.

Este trabalho é dedicado à análise de duas obras ficcionais, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, de Zora Neale Hurston, e “Light in August”, de William Faulkner. O ponto de partida da análise é a ideia que identidades são construídas de acordo com injunções discursivas específicas, que variam de contexto para contexto. Para tanto, foram analisados os dois personagens principais dos textos, Janie Crawford, uma mulher negra, e Joe Christmas, um homem cuja identidade racial é desconhecida. A comparação entre os dois se baseou na forma como ambas as identidades são construídas nos romances, em relação ao seu acesso à língua e a possibilidade de articulação dentro dela, e ao contexto no qual estão inseridos. / This research is dedicated to the analysis of two fictional works, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston and Light in August (1932) by William Faulkner. The starting point of the analysis is the idea that identities are constructed according to specific discursive injunctions, which vary from context to context. The study is focused on the main characters of both novels, Janie Crawford, a black woman, and Joe Christmas, a man whose racial identity is unknown. The comparison between the two characters is based on how their identities are constructed in the novels in relation to their access to language and their possibility of articulating within it, and the context in which they are inserted.

Este trabalho é dedicado à análise de duas obras ficcionais, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, de Zora Neale Hurston, e “Light in August”, de William Faulkner. O ponto de partida da análise é a ideia que identidades são construídas de acordo com injunções discursivas específicas, que variam de contexto para contexto. Para tanto, foram analisados os dois personagens principais dos textos, Janie Crawford, uma mulher negra, e Joe Christmas, um homem cuja identidade racial é desconhecida. A comparação entre os dois se baseou na forma como ambas as identidades são construídas nos romances, em relação ao seu acesso à língua e a possibilidade de articulação dentro dela, e ao contexto no qual estão inseridos. / This research is dedicated to the analysis of two fictional works, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston and Light in August (1932) by William Faulkner. The starting point of the analysis is the idea that identities are constructed according to specific discursive injunctions, which vary from context to context. The study is focused on the main characters of both novels, Janie Crawford, a black woman, and Joe Christmas, a man whose racial identity is unknown. The comparison between the two characters is based on how their identities are constructed in the novels in relation to their access to language and their possibility of articulating within it, and the context in which they are inserted.

Disability and animality have frequently been conjoined in American literature as the limit cases of cognition, language, and narrative. In modern and contemporary fiction, this intersection is not just thematic, but also an opportunity for formal experimentation. My dissertation considers a century-spanning group of authors that includes William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and contemporary disabled writers and artists such as Jillian Weise, Kathy High, and Sharona Franklin. It uses a combination of close reading, historical research, and theoretical analysis to argue that some of the last century’s most influential literary experiments have built upon aesthetic modes associated with both disability and animality. For instance, in The Sound and the Fury, Benjy Compson’s famously associative narration is driven as much by canine-identified sensory tendencies of smell and touch as it is by human cognitive difference, and the folkloric interludes central to Their Eyes Were Watching God are catalyzed by the work-debilitated body of a mule. Few scholars have recognized the extent to which disability and animality are entangled as aesthetic categories, because each field has typically disavowed the other: disability studies makes “full humanity” a goal while assuming the inferiority of nonhumans, and animal studies often elevates nonhuman species by emphasizing their intelligence and physical abilities. My project bridges this impasse by showing how disability and animality come together to push language and literature in new directions, revealing an unrecognized literary tradition in which narratorial capacity, ethical consideration, and even access to the text do not depend on supposedly human-defining abilities like spoken language and written literacy.

This thesis examines the genesis, maintenance, and failure of rigid and exclusionary societal models present in William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Yi- Fu Tuan's analysis of the concepts space and place serves as the foundational theoretical framework by which human spatiality may be interpreted. Combining Tuan's observations and architectural analysis with Edouard Glissant's concepts of atavistic and composite societal models allows for a much broader consideration of various political ideologies present in the South. Following this, it becomes necessary to apply a postcolonial lens to areas of Faulkner's literature to examine how these societal models are upheld and the effects they have on characters in both Reconstruction and post- Reconstruction eras. Within Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner showcases an aspect of southern history that allowed this societal model to flourish, how this model affected those trapped within it, and its ultimate failure for future generations. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Ce mémoire se propose d'analyser la concordance entre l'illustration du désir humain et sa transformation en violence sociale dans les théories du désir mimétique et du mécanisme du Bouc émissaire, développées par René Girard dans ses oeuvres Mensonges Romantiques et Vérités Romanesques et Le Bouc Émissaire, et dans l'oeuvre de William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury. Ce mémoire soutient que la description du désir humain et son acheminement en crise sociale est très similaire chez les des deux auteurs. The Sound and the Fury, tout comme les oeuvres de René Girard, décrivent le désir humain comme un mécanisme triangulaire basé sur l'imitation du sujet à un model ou médiateur. Ils démontrent aussi que ces désirs peuvent créer des rivalités féroces qui peuvent induire à une violence irrépressible. Quand cette violence se multiplie par le nombre de rivaux acharnés, elle évolue en phénomène sociale : une crise que René Girard appelle Crise Mimétique et que William Faulkner reproduit dans la majorité de ces nouvelles et précisément dans The Sound and the Fury. Le mécanisme humain décrit pour l'évacuation spontanée de la violence est aussi remarquablement conforme dans l'effigie des deux auteurs. Les écrits des deux démontrent que pour évacuer leur agressivité, les sociétés la redirigent envers un ou des individus qu'ils considèrent comme inférieurs. Finalement, les deux auteurs analysent d'une manière très rapprochée les trois méthodes utilisées par l'homme pour contenir la violence. Ils présentent tout les deux les rituels comme une méthode qui a été longtemps efficace pour canaliser les tensions mais qui n'a plus sa place dans la société moderne et ce à cause du déclin religieux. Ils décrivent aussi tout les deux les méthodes compensatoires tels que les duels et les jugent inefficace et, en dernier lieu, ils considèrent tout les deux le système légal comme une méthode efficace pour l'interruption des cycles de vengeances mais pas pour l'évacuation de la violence.

Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," as early as 1839, reveals an uneasiness about the space of the house. Most literary scholars accept that this anxiety exists and causes some tension, since it seems antithetical to another dominant motif, that of the power of place and the home as sanctuary. My critical persona, like Poe's narrator in "The House of Usher," looks into a dark, silent tarn and shudders to see in it not only the reflection of the House of Usher, but perhaps the whole of what is "Southern" in Southern Literature. Many characters who inhabit the worlds of Southern stories also inhabit houses that, like the House of Usher, are built on the faulty foundation of an ideological system that divides the world into inside(r)/outside(r) and along numerous other binary lines. The task of constructing the self in spaces that house such ideologies poses a challenge to the characters in the works under consideration in this study, and their success in doing so is dependant on their ability to speak authentically in the language of silence and to dwell instead of to just inhabit interior spaces. In my reading of Faulkner and Warren, this ideology of division is clearly to be at fault in the collapse of houses, just as it is seen to be in the House of Usher. This emphasis is especially conspicuous in several works, beginning with Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and its (pre)text, "Evangeline." Warren carries the motif forward in his late novels, Flood and Meet Me in the Green Glen. I examine these works relative to spatial analysis and an aesthetic of absence, including an interpretation of silence as a mode of authentic saying. I then discuss these motifs as they are operating in Toni Morrison's Beloved, and finally take Song of Solomon as both an end and a beginning to these texts' concerns with collapsing structures of narrative and house.