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76 pages

English

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This study is intended both for first-time readers of The Sound and the Fury and-since it offers new scholarship and critical argument on Faulkner-for established critics and scholars. Chapter 1 provides some general context about Faulkner's life and work in the American South and 'Yoknapatawpha County', and introduces the form and style of Faulkner's novel. Chapter 2 provides a discussion of the contexts of Southern history and Faulkner's family history. Chapter 3 is a discussion of the influences on Faulkner of Modernist literature and Modernist psychology and philosophy. Chapter 4 gives a close commentary on each of the novel's four narratives

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Publié par	Humanities-Ebooks
Date de parution	10 octobre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781847602060
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0224€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Reading William Faulkner:
The Sound and the Fury
Michael Cotsell
Literature Insights Humanities-Ebooks
© Michael Cotsell, 2008
The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by Humanities-Ebooks LLP, Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE
Pdf ISBN: 978-1-84760-055-4 Kindle ISBN: 978-1-84760-155-1 ePub ISBN: 978-1-84760-206-0
Many HEB titles are available in paperback and all in elegant pdf format ideal for larger screen devices from: http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk
Contents
A Note on the Author
Preface and Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: An Introduction to Faulkner’s Life and Work
1.1 ‘Yoknapatawpha County’
1.2 Early Fiction
1.3 The Chronicles
1.4 Novels of Contemporary Life
1.5 The ‘Commitment’ Writings
1.6 The Composition of The Sound and the Fury
1.7 The ‘Dark House’
1.8 Introduction to the form of The Sound and the Fury
1.9 Summary of the sections
1.10 Race in The Sound and the Fury
Chapter 2: Contexts
2.1 The South
2.2. Oxford
2.3 Southern Religion
2.4. Views of the South by Southerners
2.5 The Falkners
Chapter 3: Faulkner and Modernism
3.1 Modernism at ‘Ole Miss’ and in New Orleans
3.2 Predecessors to the Modernist Novel
3.3 New York 1920–21
3.4 Faulkner and the ‘Lost Generation’
3.5 France 1925–6
3.6 Modernist Influences: Philosophy and Psychology
Chapter 4: Reading The Sound and the Fury
4.1 Reading the title
4.2 Idiot’s Tale
4.3 The Suicide’s Tale
4.4 The Nasty Boy’s Tale
4.5 (Who) Is Caddy?
4.6 The Racist’s Tale?
Appendix: Faulkner’s Commentaries on The Sound and the Fury
A Short Bibliography
Glossary of Psychological Terms
Humanities Insights
Endnotes
A Note on the Author
Dr. Michael Cotsell is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Delaware. He was the one time Associate Editor of the Dickens Companions series to which he contributed The Companion to ‘Our Mutual Friend’ (Edinburgh University press, 1986) and the General Editor of the Series English Literature and the Wider World for which he edited the volume Creditable Warriors: English Literature and the Wider World, 1830–76 (Ashfield Press,1990). He has edited the World’s Classics edition of Our Mutual Friend and volumes of critical essays on Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities and is the author of Barbara Pym (MacMillan, 1989).
Dr. Cotsell’s most recent book is The Theater of Trauma: American Modernist Drama and the Psychological Struggle for the American Mind, 1900–1930 (Peter Lang, 2005). He continues to work on psychiatry and American Modernism.
Preface and Acknowledgements
This study is for Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
This study is intended for first-time readers of The Sound and the Fury and since it offers new scholarship and critical argument on Faulkner for established critics and scholars. Unlike the many ‘Guides to’ and ‘Notes on’ Faulkner’s novel on the market, this study aims to be accessible without simplification.
Chapter 1 provides some general context about Faulkner’s life and work. It also includes a brief introduction to the form and style of Faulkner’s novel and summaries of the novel’s four narratives. The first-time reader may want to begin with the summaries (Chapter 1.9). Chapter 2 provides a discussion of the contexts of Southern history and Faulkner’s family history. Chapter 3 is a discussion of the influences on Faulkner of Modernist literature and Modernist psychology and philosophy. It is impossible to discuss Faulkner adequately without being drawn into psychological theories he is an intensely psychological novelist who lived in intensely psychological times. To help you a brief ‘Glossary of Psychological Terms’ is provided at the end of the book.
Chapter 4 gives a close commentary on each of the four narratives and their total statement. If you are reading this book for the first time, you might well choose to read Chapter 4 before Chapters 2 and 3.
I am grateful to the following who read the typescript and made many useful comments: Dr Charles W. R. D. Moseley, Dr Susan Thomas, Michael Green, and Dr John Jebb. Thanks also to Suzanne Potts.
Quotations are from William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Vintage, 1990).
Chapter 1: An Introduction to Faulkner’s Life and Work
1.1 ‘Yoknapatawpha County’
William Faulkner 1 published The Sound and the Fury in the United States in October 1929, the same month and year as the Great Stock Market Crash a coincidence that Faulkner’s character Jason would have grimly enjoyed and the year that Faulkner married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham.
Faulkner was born in 1897 and died in 1962. Most of his novels are set around the area where he lived for much of his life, Oxford, Mississippi, a small college town in the northern part of the state and home to the University of Mississippi (‘Ole Miss’). Faulkner called Oxford ‘Jefferson’ in his fiction and the surrounding Lafayette County became the now famous ‘Yoknapatawpha County’ ‘my own little postage stamp of native soil’. 2 The fictional versions of both are not simple copies: Faulkner’s county, for instance, is much larger, and his renderings of Jefferson never directly depict the University of Mississippi, thus allowing it to represent an average town. The nearest city is Jackson (subsequently, like Oxford itself, infamous in the annals of Civil Rights); the nearest big city, fascinating and dangerous Memphis, notorious for its saloons, brothels and crime rate. Other settings, particularly New Orleans, appear in Faulkner’s fiction, notably in Mosquitoes (1927) and Wild Palms (1939), but remote and generally obscure Yoknapatawpha County was certainly the place to which Faulkner’s imagination kept returning. In fact, to understand Faulkner, we need to understand that his imagination works very powerfully through the local. Oxford and Lafayette County , however, open out to the state of Mississippi, the American South and hence America as a whole. Today, Faulkner is a novelist whose enormous literary skill, psychological depth, and sense of history give his work global cultural and political significance. Indeed, since it may be argued that the American South now dominates global politics, it may be argued that Faulkner has become increasingly relevant. This relevance is unlikely to diminish: his style astonishes and thrills us; his characters and their situations are unforgettable; no-one explores the dark side of the family or mental disintegration more deeply; and he writes with great insight into racial attitudes. His work has been a rich influence on world fiction since his time including Southern fiction by women and African-Americans and what is called postcolonial fiction.
Faulkner’s fiction, which includes novels and short stories, may be divided into four main groupings: early fiction, chronicle fiction, contemporary fiction, and ‘commitment’ fiction.
1.2 Early Fiction
Faulkner began writing short stories in New Orleans under the influence of one of America’s great short story writers, Sherwood Anderson, the author of Winesburg, Ohio (1919) His early fiction includes the stories later collected as New Orleans Sketches (1958); a novel about the impact of World War I, Soldier’s Pay (1926); and Mosquitoes (1927), a satirical novel in the style of Aldous Huxley, also set in New Orleans. These works were greeted enthusiastically by Southern intellectuals. Poet Donald Davidson thought Soldiers’ Pay to be the work of a writer with ‘a fine power of objectifying his own and other’s emotions, an artist in language, a sort of poet turned into prose’. Along with Hemingway, Faulkner was quickly identified as one of the emerging voices of a new generation. 3
1.3 The Chronicles
Many of Faulkner’s works are in whole or part long family chronicles or sagas that depend on evoking the glory of previous Southern generations, including founders of dynasties and combatants in the Civil War. These men are heroes in the grand fashion of Thomas Carlyle, author of On Heroes and Hero Worship (1841), ‘cavaliers’ (an important Southern term) of energy, high humour and madness. They also express reckless Southern individualism a rejection of Northern constraint and even morality and are touched by the idea of Nietzsche’s bermensch (superman) as developed in his Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–5) and elsewhere. Their stories are tales of sound and fury indeed; of dynasty founded on nothing but crude will; a ‘natural’ aristocracy. Among such chronicles are large sections of Flags in the Dust (written 1926–7, published 1973), much of which was revised as Sartoris (1929); Absalom, Absalom! (1936), generally regarded as the best of this kind and as one of Faulkner’s great achievements; and The Unvanquished (1938), along with many short stories.
Mad gallantry in war speaks of the indomitable spirit, but the best go down. The succeeding generations of men fare less well. They are of the defeated, reduced to self-destructive gestures, or to a masculinity that is gradually reduced by women, through the exercise of a kind of mindlessly obsessive gentility, until families peter out in impotency, incest, miscegenation, suicide and idiocy. What was once epic becomes the pathetic and absurd tragicomedy of imitated and outdated manners that have to make up for everything that hasn’t happened and hasn’t been there. Faulkner captures something that was real in the South: ‘Unregenerate Southerners were trying to live the good life on a shabby equipment, and they were grotesque in their effort to make an art out of living when they were not decently making the living.’ 4 ‘Stripped of their wealth former slave owning families clung to totems that symbolized their privileged past… They maintained an air of supremacy amid altered socio-economic realities.’ 5 Such persons often invested deeply in the myth of the ‘Lost Cause’