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In this essay I employ memory theories to examine Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. How are the memories depicted and how do they function in the novel? What are the characters 'allowed' to remember? Scholars that have written about William Faulkners usage of memories and narrative time in his novels, often claim that they together represent and create a sense of determinism and/or fatalism. Even though I agreed with that opinion, regarding time and memory in a lot of Faulkners novels, I wondered if these features in the text might not represent/mean something more, beyond that. One scholar have expressed the view that William Faulkners characters resemble blind marionettes of Destiny. I instead claim that the characters themselves, via their individual memories and temporal relations, create an internal determinism, connected with cultural memory, norms and traditions. I try to examine both the individual memories, as depicted in the novel, and the novel in its entirety, using different memory theories and narratology.

This thesis on William Faulkner's concept of knowledge beyond reason includes a study of style and characterization and a study of possible sources.

In William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels, a group of characters exists who possess three common characteristics--a closeness to mankind, a realization of the tragedy in life, and a positive response to this tragedy. The term beneficent is used to describe the twenty individuals who possess these traits. The characters are divided into two broad categories. The first includes the white and black primitives who innately possess beneficent qualities. The term primitive describes the individual who exhibits three additional traits--simplicity, nonintellectualism, and closeness to nature. The second group includes characters who must learn the attributes of beneficence in the course of the novel. All the beneficent characters serve as embodiments of the optimism found in Faulkner's fiction.

ABSTRACT Although the title of William Faulkner’s famous novel The Sound and the Fury overtly references the senses, most critics have focused on the fury rather than on the sound. However, Faulkner’s stories, vividly and descriptively set in the U.S. South, contain not only characters and plot, but also depict a rich sensory world. To neglect the way Faulkner’s characters employ their senses is to miss subtle but important clues regarding societal codes that structure hierarchies of class, gender, queerness, and race in his novels. Thus, a more complete examination of the sensory world in Faulkner’s fiction across multiple texts seems necessary to explore how Faulkner’s characters interpret the sensory stimuli in their fictional landscape and how their actions in this regard reveal the larger social constructs functioning in the novels. In particular, this dissertation seeks to borrow the theoretical approach known in fields such as history, anthropology, and sociology as sensory studies to examine nine Faulkner novels: Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, Go Down, Moses, The Hamlet, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (The Wild Palms), Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, The Town, and The Unvanquished. Such an approach requires moving away from examining sensory stimuli as symbols that are read the same way by everyone; instead, the way Faulkner’s characters use the senses is examined as a biased act, an act that is committed and interpreted differently depending on who is doing the sensing. Using this type of sensory studies framework can transform close readings of Faulkner’s texts, particularly since such an approach helps us understand the way the senses are constantly interwoven with characters’ attempts to define (and sometimes confine) the other characters. In fact, exploring the way characters actively use their senses to categorize others can reveal a hidden discourse, one where the language of the senses illuminates belief-systems in ways that are not otherwise obvious.

In my essay I will discuss the role of the main character, Miss Emily, in the short story "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner. The short story was written in 1930 and takes place in the small town of Jefferson, in the south of the USA. Miss Emily is the only person remaining of the Grierson family, a family seen as mighty, as it used to be wealthy and had a prominent position in the town, and therefore she considers herself as finer than the other townspeople. As a result, she never marries and keeps to herself most of the time. The story stretches over most of Miss Emily‟s life and the narrator focuses on her. When she in the end dies, it is revealed that she had poisoned her lover and slept next to the dead body for forty years. In this essay I suggest that Miss Emily is imaged as a goddess and I will try to show evidence for that by pointing out religious references in the text as well as by discussing the important role of the narrator. I will argue that due to the Grierson family‟s history being of importance to the town, the prominence of Miss Emily‟s looks, and the way she acts imply that she is seen by the townspeople as a goddess. Moreover, Miss Emily‟s relationship with Homer Barron and the description of her house will be analyzed to strengthen the idea that Miss Emily could be linked to divinity. In my view, if Miss Emily is perceived as a goddess, she is bound to emerge as more than a mentally disturbed woman who killed her lover.

William Faulkner undoubtedly ranks one of the best and most influential writers both in America and in history. Among his various works of art, the most famous ones are those set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which is molded out of his ¡§native soil.¡¨ Despite their Southern setting, these works convey something universally true. As Faulkner often claims, he is just a story-teller, telling about man in conflict, about how he ¡§endures and prevails.¡¨ Before he received due recognition, Faulkner wrote quite a few short stories which he expected would help him improve his economic condition, so that he could write novels at ease. Nevertheless, although he was motivated by economic interests, many of these short stories turned out very prominent. In my thesis, I translate and discuss three of his outstanding short stories--¡§Dry September,¡¨ ¡§Red Leaves,¡¨ and ¡§An Odor of Verbena.¡¨ By so doing, I hope I can introduce Faulkner¡¦s world to his Taiwan readers, who might too easily reject his major novels for their complexity and long-winding sentences, but would be glad to savor the more accessible short stories. The introductory part is divided into three chapters, beginning with a brief account of the author¡¦s life and fiction. In the second chapter I discuss mainly the theme of ¡§conflict¡¨ and the stylistic features in these three stories. Then, in the last chapter, giving some instances from my own translations and those by three translators in Mainland China, I try to demonstrate why translation is a demanding task.

Originally presented as author's thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 199-225).

This thesis discusses the effects, primarily on a person’s identity, caused by rural to urban migration during the 1920s and 1930s through investigating the migrations of four literary characters—Quentin Compson, George Webber, Jefferson Abbott, and Prudence Bly—developed by three American Modernist—William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and Dawn Powell. I first explore the population trends and movements of Americans out of rural areas to urban ones. In doing so, various sociological theories and historical events are referenced in order to better provide evidence for the reasons for this type of migration, and more importantly, in concern with this study, to illustrate common effects due to rural to urban migration that are explored in depth in subsequent chapters through the examination of the aforementioned characters. Even though the migration of people out of rural areas for more urban centers has occurred ever since the division of those two communities, the interwar years in American society is a key period to consider because of the great social and economic changes that occurred during those two decades. Additionally, it is in this era that we first see clear signs that the United States was transitioning to an urban dominated society. Each of the four characters focused on in this work undergo a rural to urban migration during their young adult years. Because each character experiences this migration in a different way, the severity of the effects of his or her migration changes too. Three of the four characters—Quentin, George, and Prudence—must cope with an identity crisis that is brought to the forefront by their rural to urban migration. Quentin experiences feelings of guilt over his opportunities versus that of his brothers. More importantly, he is unable to rectify the conflict between his perceived identity and the identity placed upon him by the urban community to which he migrates, thus influencing his suicide. George is unable to see the extreme influence that the nostalgic view of his hometown has on the way he perceives the rest of the world. Therefore, he is also unable to recognize the power of time and the inevitability of change. Each time he is forced to see the falseness of his nostalgia, a crucial portion of his identity is dismantled, throwing him into a deep depression. Prudence—due to the arrival of Jefferson, a hometown sweetheart—is forced to reconcile the rural identity she has tried for a decade to forget and the urban one she spent a decade creating. Only at the end of the novel, does she realize that her identity is actually a compilation of both her rural and urban parts. The fourth character—Jefferson Abbott—is relatively unaffected by his migration, in large part due to the stability and confidence he has in his own identity.