This thesis explores the role played by narrative desire within two modernist experimentations with novel form: Willa Cather's 1918 novel My Antonia and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936). In it, I argue that Cather and Faulkner utilize framing narratives in order to present the main plot of each novel as a product of multiple narrators' desire for a story to emerge. In My Antonia, it is the expressed wish of Jim Burden's nameless writer friend that compels him to finish writing his account of Antonia, which constitutes the main plot of the novel. Meanwhile, in Absalom, Absalom! it is Quentin's perception that Rosa "wants it told" which inspires him to investigate and reconstruct her ex-fiancee Thomas Sutpen's life story with the help of two other character-narrators: his father and college roommate Shreve. Calling on narrative theory and psychoanalysis, I argue that Cather's and Faulkner's novels depict characters' desire for both storytelling and each other to be enigmatic and intersubjective. Indeed the impulse to generate narrative on the part of the tellers in both texts--notably Jim and Quentin--is seen to arise out of a partial, but not entirely clear, sense that another wants them to do so. In other words, the narrative desire conveyed by the nameless writer and Rosa appears to have no clear object. While it is understood by Jim and Quentin that a story is desired of them, the full extent of what this story might come to be about is never fully explicated by their interlocutors. Theoretically, the intervention this project wagers by way of Cather and Faulkner is a rethinking of two influential attempts to bring together narrative theory and psychoanalysis: Peter Brooks' Reading for the Plot (1984) and Judith Roof's Come As You Are (1996). While the claims regarding narrative advanced by both Brooks and Roof rely primarily on Freud's work (notably his theories of the death drive and of sexual development), I attempt to demonstrate how Lacan's thinking allows us to understand narrative as issuing from a desire that is at once intersubjective and objectless--as appears to be the case in My Antonia and Absalom, Absalom!. Lacan's dynamic conceptualization of desire, I suggest, is not only essential to understanding these two works; it is also very much implicit within the interplay of desire and narrative form they establish.

ABSTRACT This project compares and contrasts the ways in which selected texts by William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams render their fictional figures as modern subjects engaged in the complex processes of identity-formation and transformation. These processes are deeply rooted within the context of the American South. The interrelatedness of identity and language is explored by investigating how these texts dramatize selfhood not as an essential or homogenous state, but as a perpetual process of self-fashioning and play amid multiple positionings. The central hypothesis is that identity manifests itself necessarily and continuously as a textual discourse in and through language, and that self-fashioning gives rise to ethical questions, because identity involves not only the subject’s relation to the self, but also his or her relationships with others in closely interwoven personal, familial and communal-cultural bonds. This ethical dimension underscores the relational aspects of selfhood, that is, the notion that the individual is always situated inextricably within the social, and that the fashioning of the self is thus inconceivable without a consideration of the other. The following pairs of texts are compared: As I Lay Dying and The Glass Menagerie; The Sound and the Fury and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof; Light in August and A Streetcar Named Desire.

In this dissertation I examine a variety of modern and postmodern texts by applying the theories of French philosopher Henri Bergson. Specifically, I apply Bergson's theories of time, memory, and evolution to the texts in order to analyze the meaning of the poem and novels. I assert that all of the works disrupt conventional structure in order to question the linear nature of time. They do this because each must deal with the pressures of external chaos, and, as a result, they find timeless moments can create an internal resolution to the external chaos. I set out to create connections between British, Irish, and American literature, and I examine the influence each author has on others. The modern authors I examine include T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. I then show the ways this application can elucidate the works of postmodern authors Toni Morrison and Michael Cunningham.

The medical division between constitutional homeopathy and allopathic medicine shaped the culture in which William Faulkner grew up and wrote. Early 20th century America was daily subjected to a variety of conflicting approaches to maintaining or recovering physical, psychological, or spiritual health. The culture was discussing the role of vitalism for good health; the use and dosage of medicine to treat the individual or to treat the disease instead; the interaction of the mind, body, and spirit; the tendency of personality to emerge from inherent biology or acquired traits; the varied explanations for illness; and the legitimacy of doctors, their philosophies, and their remedies. These competing definitions of psycho-biological health informed Faulkner’s character conceptions and portrayals. In their psycho-biological traits, some of his characters represent concurrently published homeopathic descriptions of constitutions quite accurately. Faulkner’s own life may have offered him opportunities to learn about alternative medicine and generated an interest--along with other medical dissidents--in opposing the newly-garnered authority of modern scientific medicine. It is also likely that Faulkner’s own beliefs about a divinity present in humans and the human capacity to neglect their spiritual essence would have instead supported the older, more romanticized, homeopathic ideas based on mind-body typology to balance an invisible vitalism. Medicine and literature has recently established itself as an engaging and complementary-paired field in the humanities. This study contributes to the maturing interdisciplinary field by contemplating a famous author and some of his character portrayals from a medical or health perspective. This study of the writer and his fictional people suggests that the unorthodox ideology of homeopathy continued to play a role in the culture through literature, even as it lacked legitimate authority from the newly established medical community.

It is all too easy to dismiss myth as belonging to the realm of the abstract and theoretical, too removed from reality to constitute anything pragmatic. And yet myth makes up the very fabric of society, informing the way history is understood and the way people and things are remembered. William Faulkner’s works approach myth with a healthy skepticism, only gradually coming to find value in a process that is often destructive; his works demand of their readers the same perceptive criticism. This thesis approaches myth through the lens of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," Absalom, Absalom!, and "The Bear." Faulkner's texts ultimately ask readers to bear witness by thinking critically about the process of myth-making, not only in the realm of literature but in the world as a whole.

No description available.

Based on a joint qualitative and quantitative approach, this dissertation analyzes Faulkner´s use of the house motif and related imagery in all of his novels and short story collections. Chapter One recapitulates what has been published on this issue before, a definition of the term "literary motif" follows in Chapter Two. Chapter Three provides a brief outline of different architectural styles used in the American South. Chapter Four introduces the reader to Lévi-Strauss´ notion of a house-based society. Chapter Five offers information about the use of the house motif in American literature in general. Chapter Six, the main part of my dissertation, is divided into three sections. The first section analyzes the significance of private houses [plantation houses, mansions, town houses, and cabins], the second section discusses the nature of public houses [courthouse, jail, banks, barbershops, churches, brothels] and public open spaces, while the third section, by contrast, highlights the symbolic meaning of elementary co-occurrences [attics, windows, doors, porches, fences] in Faulkner´s body of work. In the conclusion in Chapter Seven, my dissertation presents inter alia the following results: 1. The house motif and elementary co-occurrences symbolize a segregated society. 2. Yoknapatawpha County is a house-based society as defined by Lévi-Strauss in which houses are key symbols to organize and structure Yoknapatawpha´s society. 3. Faulkner derived his use of the house-motif from the Gothic tradition. 4. House related imagery like windows, doors, and fences, for instance, are not only used as spatial metaphors of liminality; these elementary co-occurrences also have a prominent position the complex symbol system of the house motif. The appendix contains statistics to fifteen novels and four short story collections highlighting the most frequently occurring nouns in these literary works.

This MA thesis provides a close analysis of William Faulkner's most famous short story, "A Rose for Emily." The focus the thesis is motivated by what I take to be the central theme of the short story: community and its functioning. Shifting the focus from the main character to the narrator, I want to "rectify" the perception of the short story which owns its renown largely to its "shocking" or "gothic" aspect. The utilized methodology is chosen with respect to the proposed interpretation. The prism through which the text is approached is narratology. To account for the peculiar narrator of "A Rose for Emily," I use the narratological framework of "collective narrative" ("we narration"). Another important theoretical framework introduced in order to interpret the short story is the interdisciplinary concept of "collective memory." Some sociological conceptions of community are discussed. In the introductory chapter, I mainly discuss the concept of person in narrative and argue against the traditional distinction between first and third person narratives. In the second chapter, I provide an introduction to the technique of collective narrative. The third chapter provides a close reading of "A Rose for Emily" in the context of collective narrative. Firstly, I identify the narrator as essentially...

This thesis aims to understand William Faulkner as an environmentally conscious author whose views on land abuse appear throughout his work. The goal is twofold: first, to examine how he criticizes ecological abuse; second, to discover which sources likely influenced him and helped him to form his perspectives on environmental issues.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T19:58:58Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Itamar Aparecido de Oliveira.pdf: 1260859 bytes, checksum: 79681b27fbd6a7c2e3d27a539b7cfc3a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-02-25 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / In this work we analyse William Faulkner's novel The sound and the fury with the objective of meditating on the mythical structure which performs and holds a constant change of meaning of the story and the permanent dissolution found in all the narrative layers. To do that, we survey the main myths and archetypes that appear in the work and that are inverted or altered by the author with the intention of founding the creation of a modern narrative, specially in formal construction. Our main problem was the way to approach the novel, in which it is noticeable the use of an anti-Cartesian logic in the disposition of the elements: narrators, characters, time, space, archetypes, atmosphere. They seem to be subverted by a system organized through logic of bricolage, which leads us to ask: is that logic the organizational system of The sound and the fury? We made a dialogue with the studies on myth and literature (Dumézil, Meletínski, Frye), the conceptualizations of myth (Eliade, Vernant, Cassirer) and the relations between myth and bricolage (Lévi-Strauss), so as to understand better the technical and stylistic features present in the novel and how they appear as products of the logic of bricolage, encouraging the revitalization of certain myths and specifically the plantation myth, which legitimated the agrarian system of the South of the US. From our analysis we verify that the plenitude of the social dissolution of the South present in Faulkner's intrigue is only revealed when we observe the form and content of the mythical narrative which constitutes the novel / Neste trabalho analisamos o romance O som e a fúria, de William Faulkner, objetivando refletir sobre a estrutura mítica que sustenta e promove constante ressignificação da obra e a permanente dissolução encontrada em todos os estratos da narrativa. Para isso, sondamos os principais mitos e arquétipos que ecoam na obra e que são invertidos ou alterados pelo autor com o intuito de alicerçar a criação de uma narrativa moderna, em especial no que concerne à construção da forma. Nosso problema residiu na maneira pela qual abordar esse romance, no qual percebemos a utilização de certa lógica anticartesiana na disposição dos elementos constitutivos narradores, personagens, tempo, espaço, cronotopos, arquétipos, ambientação , que aparentam se encontrar subvertidos por sistema organizacional estruturado numa espécie de lógica da bricolagem, o que nos instigou à seguinte indagação: essa lógica consiste no motor organizacional de O som e a fúria? Dialogamos com os estudos acerca de mito e literatura (Dumézil, Meletínski, Frye), as conceituações sobre mito (Eliade, Vernant, Cassirer) e a relação entre mito e bricolagem (Lévi-Strauss), a fim de compreendermos quais os recursos técnicos e estilísticos presentes na obra e como estes se mostram produtos da lógica da bricolagem, promovendo a reatualização de certos mitos e, especificamente, do mito da plantação que legitimava o sistema agrário instaurado no Sul dos Estados Unidos. A partir de nossas observações, ressaltamos que a plenitude da dissolução social sulista presente na intriga faulkneriana somente se revela quando observados forma e conteúdo da narrativa mítica à qual constitui o romance