Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1952. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 485-499).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 249-256). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

The three novels discussed in this essay avoid the abstraction of ideology without resorting to oversimplification. William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man are, among other things, the presentation of character in context. In chapters two, three, and four, I consider consecutively the character structures of the protagonists of the three novels in terms of the interaction between the individuals and the communally prescribed character structures of the traditional South which form their context. With Addie Bundren, Faulkner exemplifies the southerner's preference for stable, primary-colored individuality over the more mobile, versatile, inclusive "individuation" to which he objects because, from his traditional viewpoint, it leaves the individual isolated and alienated with no way of relating his world to the necessarily divergent worlds around him and no way of coping adequately with unforseen human events. Inheriting negation in place of tradition, Addie's death and burial leave the family in a bestially primitive state, existing without benefit of the accumulated experience of history. The traditional society, however, is not the only one that utilizes the experience of past generations. A perspective of the values and limitations of a family living according to southern traditions as it faces changes in conflict with its "individuated" members provides a literary view of the workings of a traditional milieu from the inside in Delta Wedding. Welty intimates that real life--the spontaneous action and reaction of an "individuated" being to present phenomena--is more powerful than the restraining and, because dated, erroneous traditions surrounding it. The protagonist of Ellison's Invisible Man moves from a culturally prescribed "preconsciousness" to the furthest extremes of "individuation". The acceptable ways of being black in the South offer so little possibility for the black man that his entire environment can be seen as a maze of traps placed by the culture between the individual and what twentieth-century democratic thought has come to define as basic human freedom. Falling first into the hands of racists, then paternalists, and finally--the most subtle trap of all--the complex and contradictory concepts of the nature of the black man as conceived by southern black men themselves, the Invisible Man exposes as he experiences the primary facets of southern racism. Breaking through these traditions, the Invisible Man does not attempt to become a white man with a black skin, but locates those elements of his black culture that are viable within the larger perspective of his liberated consciousness. Finally, Ellison posits the need for an "individuated" personality as prerequisite to the naming of the reality that forms its context. And, as Faulkner has shown with Addie Bundren, individuated being has insufficient scope for meeting existential exigencies if it is formed without the positive tensions of a broader than individual view--what Ellison calls "myth". As Welty shows, the southern myth is insufficiently inclusive to allow for universal survival through diversified compatibility. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

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

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2006. / Thomas L. McHaney, Pearl A. McHaney, committee co-chairs; Matthew Roudane, committee member. Electronic text (170 p.) : digital, PDF file. Title from title screen. Description based on contents viewed July 3, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 158-169).

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.