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.

The dissertation examines regionalism in selected musical works of Charles Faulkner Bryan (1911-1955). The composer's upbringing and cultural heritage are examined within the context of the history and traditions of the Upper Cumberland region of Tennessee. The selected scores are examined for textual, musical, and dramatic elements that reflect Bryan's regionalism. Each score is analyzed to see how Bryan incorporated these elements into his compositional technique and dramaturgy. This study codifies those elements and demonstrates their significance in light of Bryan's rural southern heritage. Chapter 1 surveys the existing literature and primary sources on Bryan. The methodology involves comparisons of Bryan's life and music with other American composers like Charles Ives and Aaron Copland. Important sources used for this study were Bryan's scores and personal correspondence from the Charles Faulkner Bryan Collection of the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville and the library at Tennessee Technological University (Cookeville). Chapter 2 is a biographical sketch of Bryan's life, from his birth in McMinnville, Tennessee, through his career as a composer and music educator. Chapter 3 presents a summary of Tennessee's history, with particular attention to the Upper Cumberland region where Bryan lived. Chapter 4 examines Bryan's Rebel Academy (1939), an operetta Bryan composed for use with his students at Tennessee Polytechnic Institute in Cookeville. Chapter 5 examines White Spiritual Symphony (1940) and Bryan's sources from both print and oral traditions for the white spirituals used in this work. Chapter 6 examines The Bell Witch (1947), a secular cantata based on a southern legend of the supernatural. Chapter 7 examines Cumberland Interlude: 1790 (1947), a cantata centered on the character of Andrew Jackson. Chapter 8 examines Bryan's largest work, the two-act opera Singin' Billy (1952). It is based on a fictional episode in the life of nineteenth-century singing-school master William Walker, compiler of Southern Harmony . Chapter 9 summarizes the dissertation and draws conclusions on the role of regionalism in the selected musical works of Bryan. / This item is only available to students and faculty of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. If you are not associated with SBTS, this dissertation may be purchased from <a href="http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb">http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb</a> or downloaded through ProQuest's Dissertation and Theses database if your institution subscribes to that service.

Hormis son dernier film en date, Resnais a toujours refusé d’adapter des romans tout en ne travaillant, durant de nombreuses années, qu’avec des écrivains avant tout romanciers. Premier de ses films à avoir été écrit par un dramaturge de formation, Providence (1977) met pourtant en scène un vieil écrivain malade et alcoolique en train d’imaginer les scènes tour à tour horrifiques et comiques d’un ultime roman dont les héros ne sont autres que ses proches. Ce paradoxe fonde le présent essai, centré sur un film d’une rare exactitude en matière de création littéraire et dont la structure en diptyque met à nu les rapports de la fiction et du réel. Réhabilitant la notion de « cinéma littéraire » tout en faisant éclater le cadre trop réducteur de l’adaptation et en posant le récit et non le spectacle comme enjeu majeur chez Resnais, cette étude explore les liens plus intimes existant entre les livres et les films. Permettant de revenir sur des romanciers fondamentaux de la modernité tels que Melville, Proust et Faulkner, la machine cinématographique de Resnais trouve peut-être dans leurs textes son meilleur usage. Et c’est ainsi que, employé dans toute son active spécularité, Providence révèle les profondes affinités qu’entretiennent l’écriture et le suicide. Tourmenté par celui de son épouse qu’il pose au centre d’une histoire où les vieillards, changés en loups-garous, sont parqués dans les stades d’extermination d’un état de terreur, du fond de son manoir nocturne de Providence, le grantécrivain et pathétique démiurge s’escrime à nous faire peur avec sa propre agonie : c’est peut-être ce qui fait de lui le plus véridique de tous les auteurs abymés au cinéma. / AApart from his latest film Resnais has always been reluctant about the adaptation of novels despite working for many years exclusively with writers who were mainly novelists. However, Providence (1977), his first film ever to have been written by a professional playwright, stages an elderlywriter, sick and alcoholic, in the course of imagining scenes, alternating between the horrific and the comic, of an ultimate novel the heroes of which are none other than his own next of kin. This paradox constitutes the core of the present essay which is centered around a film of rare precision regarding the literary creation, and its diptycal structure provides a deep insight into the links of fiction and reality. By rehabilitating the notion of “literary cinema”, while bursting the far too limiting frame of adaptation, and while presenting the storytelling rather than the showing as Resnais’ major engagement, the present analysis explores the more intimate relations between books and films. While enabling the return to fundamental novelists of modernity such as Melville, Proust and Faulkner, Resnais’ cinematographic machine may find in their texts its most efficient use. Through its active mise en abyme Providence reveals the profound affinities between writing novels and committing suicide. Tormented by his wife’s suicide which he places in the centre of a story where the elderly, transformed into werewolves, are locked in the extermination stages of a state of terror, at the heart of his nocturnal manor in Providence, the grantécrivain and pathetic demiurge is struggling to frighten us with his own agony. This probably makes him the most truthful of all abymed writers in cinema.

Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2006. / Title from title page screen (viewed on Feb. 8, 2007). Thesis advisor: Thomas Haddox. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2005. / Title from title page screen (viewed on February 1, 2006). Thesis advisor: Thomas Haddox. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis evaluates how effectively the trilogy's laws and law enforcers further the ends of the fictional laws. The study examines the trilogy's law enforcers' responses to Snopes violations and bendings of the laws to evaluate the laws and their enforcers. The enforcers' responses to Snopes wrongs make clear how well the laws are written. These responses also reveal how well the enforcers themselves are able to achieve the objectives of the laws. It is argued in the thesis that although the laws are effectively written, the law enforcers fail to enforce the laws and, consequently, fail to achieve the laws' ends. It is also shown that the enforcers invariably harm innocent persons when they fail to enforce the law.

Ce travail présente la manière dont William Faulkner réfléchit la fonction identitaire de la narration dans plusieurs de ses romans : The Sound and the Fury, As I lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! et Requiem for a Nun. L’appartenance des personnages du corpus au Sud des États-Unis exacerbe leur faille constitutive, qu’ils cherchent alors à compenser par la médiation du récit. Cette thèse étudie, à travers le prisme de la théorie de la mimèsis de Paul Ricœur, comment ces personnages configurent leur temps vécu et se projettent mimétiquement dans leur récit afin de procéder à une herméneutique de soi et atteindre ainsi l’appropriation de soi qu’ils recherchent. Cependant, les narrateurs sont tous saisis d’un élan déconstructeur qui met en lumière l’irrésolution du langage grâce auquel ils essayent de se créer une identité de substitution. Ils prennent alors conscience que le langage se dissémine et que la présence qu’ils tentent de faire advenir se dérobe dès qu’elle apparaît. / This dissertation studies the issue of identity in several of William Faulkner’s novels (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Requiem for a Nun) and how characters attempt to retrieve a sense of self through narration. The characters’ belonging to the American South exacerbates their inner gap, which they then try to fill thanks to their story-telling. This study examines, through the prism of Ricoeur’s theory of mimesis, how these characters configure their world of action and project themselves mimetically into their narratives so as to achieve self-understanding through a hermeneutical process. However, the narrators under study are overwhelmed with a deconstructive impetus which sheds light on the indecisiveness of the language thanks to which they are trying to create a substitute identity. They thus become aware that language disseminates itself and that the presence they are attempting to create gives way as soon as it appears.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Uppsala University, 1983. / Includes index. Bibliography: p. 159-169.

The aim of this study is not to explain Juan Rulfo in the light of William Faulkner, although the latter's influence among Spanish American writers is unquestionable. Rather, I propose to specifically examine Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Rulfo's Pedro Paramo in comparative terms, since both novels are about the conflict between human desire and reality: they deal with longings, particularly those of Thomas Sutpen and Pedro Paramo, which never achieve ultimate satisfaction, in spite of these central characters' overwhelming and obsessive will to power which creates Sutpen's Hundred and Comala in the image of each protagonist. Each character tries to assume the omnipotence of a god, once his unthinking participation in the existential reality has been destroyed by chance traumatic occurrences. Comparable metamorphic organizing images exist in the two novels: a square and a circle. They represent the protagonists' conception of a protected space/world with an illusory center, born out of desire and representing an ideal which would render meaningful Sutpen's and Paramo's existence. The heart of Sutpen's dream is an heir to continue his dynasty and Paramo is haunted by the idealized Susana whom he claims to be the reason of all his actions. However, the two fabricated worlds are eventually revealed as fictions, and the centers of both structures collapse into the dust of reality. What remains of the two protagonists is only a motionless marble tombstone in a decayed plantation and a crumbled heap of stones in a moribund village. The inheritors of the two worlds are a mulatto idiot and an incestuous couple. After commenting on some critical opinions of the two novels and their protagonists, I trace the conception, the workings, and the collapse, with its consequences, of the two worlds of desire. I follow an approximately chronologial order, although the two texts are anything but chronological.