By comparing the novels of William Faulkner and Patrick White, this thesis
reconsiders modernism's elitism and solipsism by revealing within them a critical interest in
liberating minority perspective. Theoretical debates which continue to insist on modernism's
inherent distance from the identity politics which front the postmodernist movement are
overlooking modernism's deeply embedded evaluative mechanisms which work to expose
and criticize the activity of psychic and social co-optation.
Faulkner and White are both engaged in fictionally tracing the complexities of a
failing patriarchy which can no longer substantiate its primary subjects — the white, upper
class male. As representatives of modernism we can see that Faulkner and White, perhaps
unwittingly, initiate the awareness that the 'failure' of their chosen subjects is in large
measure due to processes of marginalization which both created the authoritative power
structures within which they are constructed and helped serve to collapse them. The classic
isolation of the modernist subject can be looked at not simply as an isolation predicated on
endless self-referentiality, but rather on a desperate social outreaching for which he or she is
not psychically equipped. By following the trajectory and perspective of specific novels and
characters it becomes clear that it is precisely this handicap which clears the textual space for
diversity of representation, just as it overturns the notion of modernism's functioning
separatism.
Chapter one concentrates on the double-edged representation of the female subject
constructed as always-already 'guilty' within the psychologically, emotionally and physically
repressive terms of the dominant male power structures within the context of Faulkner's
Requiem for a Nun and White's A Fringe of Leaves. Chapter two investigates the
psychological parameters of the morally disenfranchised modern subject whose
disillusionment results from prejudicial social practices promoted by virulent racial anxiety
as exemplified in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and White's Voss. The third and final
chapter discusses Light in August and Riders in the Chariot with attention to modernism's
own investigation of the exclusion of minority voices from collective social imagining.
The thesis posits that literary modernism is interested less with reconciling its literary
subjects within a self-contained totalizing project than it is with invoking new social and
psychological paradigms that stress the necessity of external, not internal, represented
multiplicity, and that what has been (mis)recognized as modernism's self-closure is, in fact,
the key not only to its own continuing relevance, but to the contemporaneous literary
injunction to let all voices be heard.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/14815 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Trautman, Andrea Dominique |
| 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 |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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