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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.56624 |
| Date | January 1992 |
| Creators | Worsley, Christopher Geoffrey |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001317006, proquestno: AAIMM80390, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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