Most critical acclaim of William Faulkner has focused on his innovations of narrative technique, and while critics have frequently noted the correlation between form and meaning in his novels, the central focus of these novels--race--has largely been ignored in the criticism. The purpose of this paper is to examine Faulkner's narrative methodology and arrangement of material in order to demonstrate that the structures of his novels, particularly Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!, consistently enhance and dramatize the major subject and themes of the novels. Under careful scrutiny, these structures reveal an effective and dramatic parallel between Faulkner's rhetorical methodology and the complexity of his subject matter--the South, and the issue of race.

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This thesis is concerned with Freud, Lacan and Faulkner's explorations of psychology and language, regarded as differential versions of common concerns. In the first part, using aspects of the Freudian concept of the unconscious, and reading Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness narrative in The Sound and the Fury, we find that Faulkner seeks to convey the flow of the unconscious. In the second part, we see that Lacan reads Freud through Saussure's linguistics, and renews Freudian psychoanalysis with the Lacanian concept of an unconscious structured like a language. Beyond Freud, with reference to these Lacanian notions, we find that Faulkner produces a narrative structured like a language. In the third part, through the application of Lacanian theories of narration to literary theories, and through a Barthes-inspired comparison of Faulkner's novel with Lu Xun's short story "A Madman's Diary", we see that while Lu Xun gives his readers a world of meaning, Faulkner shows them the world of the word without any meaning by creating a new narrative strategy.

Absalom, Absalom! presents the voices of a series of characters who suffer crises when they discover the meaning in other characters' languages or voices to be different from their own. This difference creates an aporia (a radical doubt, a sense of loss of familiar meaning) which disrupts the listening individual's sense of his or her previously 'unified' self. I show that these characters in Faulkner's novel do not have unified voices; their narratives develop as repetitions of the crisis moment when another's voice influenced their way of relating to themselves through language. / I also show that the crisis of meaning that characters in the book experience is enacted on another level. A difficult book to read because of its many textual figures of doubt, Absalom may be said to generate a crisis of interpretation in its readers. This thesis offers a way of reading the text which explores the various potential meanings of these aporias in the novel's discursive surface, and so avoids the experience of crisis, of anxiety. This method of reading is based on the mode of reading exemplified by one of the text's own characters: Shreve McCannon, who is not discouraged by the fact that neither the narratives he hears nor the speculative, hypothetical narratives he produces in response make complete and coherent sense of everything.

Collected Stories of William Faulkner, published in 1950 and awarded the National Book Award for Fiction in 1951, is more than an arbitrarily arranged selection of representative stories. Indeed, it is remarkably similar in form and theme to many of Faulkner's novels, especially Go Down, Moses, and can profitably be read as a unified work.Like Go Down, Moses, As I Lay Dying, Light in August and other Faulkner novels, Collected Stories is structured around a center, in this case a theme: the relationship between man and his environment. The six chapters of Collected Stories and the stories within each chapter are arranged in a "counterpointed" fashion; together, they offer myriad ways of looking at the central theme.Each chapter of the work is unified thematically, and each ultimately has relevance to the theme of man in relationship to his environment. "The Country" is set in ruralYoknapatawpha County and concerns the idea of self-assertion.

The purpose of this study was two-fold: (1) To establish William Faulkner's informal theory by comparing interview statements which he made on the subject of dialect with Sumner Ives's formal theory and (2) To uncover broad patterns in Faulkner's use of dialect markers from the beginning to the end of his literary career by making a rigorous statistical analysis of his use of dialect markers in eight Yoknapatawpba County novels written between the beginning and the end of his career.Chapter 1 is an introduction to the study. Chapter 2 contains a review of literature in the field of dialect study in recent years and examines the main relationships between those studies and this one. Chapter 3 discusses the basic principles of Sumner Ives's formal dialect theory, particularly as they may be- applied to William Faulkner's use of dialect. Chapter 4 compares Faulkner's informal dialect theory, as it was expressed in various interview statements which he made on the subject of dialect, with Ives's formal theory. Chapter 5 describes the data gathering procedures for the statistical analysis of Faulkner's use of dialect markers, and Chapter 6 gives the results of the analysis. Chapter 7 presents the conclusions for the entire study.The comparison of William.Faulkner's informal dialect theory and Sumner Ives's formal one reveals that they were, in their broad outlines, essentially the same.For the purpose of analyzing Faulkner's use of dialect markers, his works were divided into three periods-early, middle, and late--with the following novels selected for analysis in these periods: early, Sartoris (1929) and The Sound and the Fury (1929); middle, Light in August (1932), The Unvanquished (1938), and The Hamlet (1940) ; and late, Intruder in the Dust (1948), The Town (1957), and The Reivers (1962). In all 3,7144 dialogue passages were analyzed in the eight novels; these dialogue passages contained 83,619 words.Also for purposes of analysis, a dialect marker was defined as either a phonological spelling or a nonstandard grammatical construction. The statistical analysis of Faulkner's use of dialect markers was an analysis of variance involving seven independent variables and six dependent variables. The independent' variables were the numerical order in which the novels analyzed were published and the numerical order of the literary period in which they were grouped with other novels in the study and the age, sex, class, race, and location of the characters who spoke the dialogue analyzed. The dependent variables were the percentages of words used as dialect markers per utterance under the categories 'total', 'verbs or auxiliaries', 'nouns', 'adjectives or adverbs', 'pronouns or demonstratives', and 'others'.The analysis of Faulkner's use of dialect markers revealed that he made significant change in that use from the beginning to the middle, but not from the middle to the end of his career. It showed that the greatest part of that change was a decrease in marker use by lower class characters rather than middle or upper class characters and by black characters rather than white characters. It also showed significant change on a sex basis with a larger decrease for male than female characters and a significant difference on an age basis with children and old adults using higherpercentages of their words as dialect markers than young middle aged adults. On a parts of speech basis, the analysis indicated that Faulkner's most frequently used and most consistently used dialect marker was the verb.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Title from file title page. Thomas L. McHaney, committee chair; Nancy Chase, Marti Singer, committee members. Electronic text (175 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed November 6, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 161-175).

Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 1992. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2835. Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [107]-110).

Thesis--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [535]-544). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 31-33)