This thesis examines the semiotic experiences in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury from a reader perspective by analyzing in what ways sensorial gesamtkunstwerk is used to convey or evoke sensations that appeal to the reader on a cognitive level. Drawing from Marco Caracciolo’s theories on experientiality which operate under the assumption that an evoked feeling from a text is dependent on the reader’s familiarity with their emotions and senses, this thesis claims that the bridge between narratological (textual) experiences and the reader’s experiences in the novel is made possible through sensorial aesthetics that appeal to our sensory modalities and that operate in a gestalt fashion to form a sensorial gesamtkunstwerk. Upon closer analysis, the experientiality in The Sound and the Fury is not only evoked by sensory modalities operating as a sensorial gesamtkunstwerk that draws on the reader’s cognitive and sensorial familiarity as is suggested by Caracciolo, but the analysis also exposes a narratological gesamtkunstwerk that operates at an intratextual level and which is only manifested when the novel is examined holistically. Containing differently perceived semiotic experiences, collectively, the differently narrated sections complement one another in such a way that they, too, synthesize into a gesamtkunstwerk that is dependent upon each section to fully operate.

This thesis examines nonhuman phenomenological experiences, communication, and sensory perception in Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone. Drawing on literary and pedagogical theories by Roman Bartosch, Monika Fludernik, Marco Caracciolo, David Herman, and Judith Langer, the thesis argues that Gowdy’s novel employs narrative strategies and devices that involve nonhuman experientiality evoked from sensorial configurations, narration, and textual cognitive and embodied experiences. These represented experiences disrupt human primacy by establishing a disorientation that challenges the anthropocentric bias in the novel and decenters the human reader. Moreover, the thesis offers suggestions for using the novel in conjunction with envisionment building to discuss animal alterity and anthropocentrism in the Swedish EFL classroom.