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1	THEMATIC PATTERNING AS A STRUCTURING DEVICE IN WILLIAM FAULKNER'S "GO DOWN, MOSES" Corrick, James A. January 1981 (has links) 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.
2	Go Down, Moses and Faulkner's moral vision Dahlie, Hallvard January 1964 (has links) The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the importance of Go Down, Moses in the working out of Faulkner's moral vision. By and large, critics have considered this book to be a central or pivotal work in this process, seeing Ike McCaslin's renunciation as a meaningful response to the curses of slavery and miscegenation which have beset the South for so many generations. Furthermore, some of them point out that Ike's initiation into the primitive simplicity of the wilderness world of Sam Fathers represents a solution for modern man in his own troubled world: somehow to effect a reversion to a simpler world with its concomitant virtues of innocence, humility, and self-sufficiency. On the whole, these critics have concentrated mainly on "The Bear" section of Go Down, Moses, and to a lesser extent on "Delta Autumn" and "The Old People," the three stories in which Ike directly appears. Consequently, their conclusions about Faulkner's moral vision stem almost entirely from their interpretation of Ike's responses to his two legacies, the wilderness world and the plantation world, with relatively little attention being paid to the responses of the other inheritors of the McCaslin curse. Thus, Go Down, Moses as a thematically unified work has been largely neglected, and the experiences of Ike McCaslin have been emphasized at the expense of those of the other inhabitants of the plantation world. This thesis will pursue the argument that the above interpretation is misleading on several counts, and hence that it is necessary to see the centrality of Go Down, Moses in a different perspective. First of all, by examining the nature of the plantation world, we will see that what Ike really repudiated was not just a legal inheritance, but a very real world in which the constituents of a full and meaningful life were everywhere evident. Secondly, it becomes evident in the analysis of Ike’s renunciation that his decision meant in effect that he was abdicating his responsibility for developing sound moral and ethical relationships within the world he was born into, and that his obsession with the values of the wilderness world represented living in terms of ritual rather than of reality. In the third place, the responses of the other inhabitants of the plantation world reflect a far more meaningful grasp of both the past and the present than does Ike, and in the perspective of these people, he suffers a significantly reduced stature. It becomes clear, then, that Faulkner uses Ike's responses to illustrate the futility of the static idealist rather than the sacrifice of a dedicated and determined reformer. And finally, the evidence in such later novels as Intruder in the Dust, A Fable, and The Reivers, as well as in Faulkner's own public utterances in the Nobel Prize Speech, at the University of Virginia, and at Nagano, indicates clearly how far man must progress beyond the idealism of the Ike McCaslins of the world in order to make an effective contribution to the moral and ethical status of his society. This thesis does not dispute the fact that "The Bear" is the key work in Go Down, Moses, nor that Ike is a central figure, but it does maintain that their significance can be, determined only by a close examination of the work as a whole. Such an examination will clearly reveal Faulkner's larger concern: that man must respond to his world as he finds it, whether that world is the wilderness, the plantation, or the modern world, and that the decisions he makes must be based on the realities of the world he has inherited. Within this perspective, it is evident that the responses of the Edmondses, the Beauchamps, and the miscellaneous inhabitants of the McCaslin plantation world must be carefully analyzed, for only against the tangible exigencies of the day-to-day lives of these people can the actions of Ike be properly assessed. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate
3	Temporal structure and meaning : the defamiliarization of the reader in Faulkner's Go down, Moses Fessenden, William E. January 1990 (has links) This study of Faulkner's Go Down, Moses uses the reader-response theories of Wolfgang Iser to examine the affective impact of strategically-arranged folk conventions and mythopoeic devices upon a textually-based, white "civilized" reader. Using the devices of Southwestern humor, the trickster, and the tragic Black folk tale, "Was" through "Pantaloon in Black" repeatedly sidetrack the reader into unconscious participation in the white-code attitudes he was invited to criticize. When this hypocritical participation is discovered at certain "points of significance" in "The Fire and the Hearth" and "Pantaloon in Black," the reader's rationally-humanistic norms are rendered ineffectual, setting the stage for the undermining of a second idealism based on primitive myth. In "The Old People" and "The Bear" the reader is induced by mythopoeic devices to adopt Isaac McCaslin's unifying mythical norms and, thereby, to criticize his own failures in "Was" through "Pantaloon in Black" along with Southern civilization's socially-fragmenting rational-empiric concept of progress. "Delta Autumn," however, will undermine the reader's attempts to create moral unity using Isaac's natural hierarchy. With mythopoeic devices withdrawn, the wilderness destroyed by civilization, and Isaac McCaslin's reversion to white-code attitudes regarding Roth's Black/white offspring, the reader can see Isaac's experience in "The Bear" for what it really is, not an introduction into Sam Fathers's immutable cyclic unity but an initiation into fragmenting Cavalier forms and values. Once again the reader faces the hypocritical ineffectuality of his own idealism. For by emotionally and intellectually identifying with Isaac's misperception of the wilderness experience, he has aligned himself with socially-alienating rather than socially-unifying values. Now confronting the fragmentation dramatized in Isaac's terror-motivated racism and experienced in his own textual failures, the reader is ready for "the existential norm of "Go Down, Moses," where he is encouraged to construct meaning out of non-meaning by negating the "bad faith" of Gavin Stevens, who in fear chooses stable but racially-fragmenting Cavalier values, and by affirming the "good faith" of Molly Beauchamp and Miss Worsham, who choose the temporal unity of shared suffering in the face of chaos. / Department of English
4	AFRICAN AMERICAN SPIRITUALS AND THE BIBLE: SELECTING TEXTS FOR SECONDARY EDUCATION INSTRUCTION Michael James Greenan (9719168) 15 December 2020 (has links) <p>The research in this thesis attempts to select texts from the African American Spirituals and the Bible that are appropriate for secondary language arts instruction, specifically for grades 9-12. The paper first gives an overview of legal justifications and educational reasons for teaching religious literature in public schools. Then, relevant educational standards are discussed, and, using the standards as an initial guide, I identify common themes within the Spirituals and Bible, which, from my analysis of various literatures, are slavery, chosenness, and coded language. Next, I describe my systematic effort to choose texts from the Spirituals and the Bible. To help accomplish this, I draw primarily from two tomes: <i>Go Down Moses: Celebrating the African-American Spiritual</i> and <i>Biblical Literacy: The Essential Bible Stories Everyone Needs to Know</i>. After I describe the research process of selecting texts, I form judgments about which biblical passages and African American Spirituals are particularly worthy of study, along with their applicable and mutual themes. </p> Education African American Spirituals Bible Spirituals English Education African Americans Slavery Chosenness Coded Language Themes Secondary Education High School Curriculum Texts Interpretation Religion Christianity Judaism Scripture Critical Thinking Hebrew Bible New Testament Literature Blacks Selecting Texts Exodus Revelation Go Down Moses Biblical Literacy Standards Religious Texts Bound for Canaan Land Daniel Obama Religious texts in public schools language arts secondary instruction negro spirituals Moses Frederick Douglass John Brown's Body A Promised Land biblical interpretation biblical allusions allusions sorrow songs W.E.B. Du Bois Book of Revelation apocalypse in literature apocalypse biblical apocalypse Book of Daniel Genesis religion in public schools Black Spirituals African American religion Bible as literature African American history American slavery slavery in Bible Book of Exodus chosen high school curriculum religion in curriculum religious texts religious literature

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