Doreen Fowler - Böcker

Fowler provides a psychoanalytic treatment of Faulkner's work, employing a poststructuralist feminist methodology to assess the symbolic meanings of race and gender in ""The Sound and the Fury"", ""As I Lay Dying"", ""Light In August"", ""Absalom, Absalom!"", and ""Go Down, Moses"".

Fowler provides a psychoanalytic treatment of Faulkner's work, employing a poststructuralist feminist methodology to assess the symbolic meanings of race and gender in ""The Sound and the Fury"", ""As I Lay Dying"", ""Light In August"", ""Absalom, Absalom!"", and ""Go Down, Moses"".

In these stimulating papers from the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference in 1985, feminism and Faulkner studies collide, with beneficial results for each.The disruptive and disturbing characterization of women in Faulkner's fictional world and the influence of actual women in the novelist's life are given attentive study in these papers. The contributors to this collection consider questions debated for many decades in Faulkner studies and those recently raised to prominence under the illuminating ray of feminist criticism.""There is throughout Faulkner something disturbing,"" Noel Polk observes, ""about the comprehensiveness with which women in his work are associated with blood and excrement and filth and death.

In 1944, William Faulkner wrote to Malcolm Cowley, ""I'm telling the same story over and over which is myself and the world. That's all a writer ever does, he tells his own biography in a thousand different terms.""With these words, Faulkner suggests that what changes in the course of his prolific novel-writing career is not so much the content but the style, ""the thousand different terms"" of his fiction. The essays in Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction, first presented at the 1987 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi, focus on Faulkner's narrative inventiveness, on how Faulkner, like his character Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, relentlessly kept ""trying to say.""The contributors, authorities on Faulkner's narrative, offer a wide variety of critical approaches to Faulkner's fiction-writing process. Cleanth Brooks, for example, applies the strategies of New Criticism to Faulkner's rendering of the heroic and pastoral modes; Judith L. Sensibar attempts to locate biographical sources for repeated Faulknerian paradigms; and Philip M. Weinstein draws on the theories of the Marxist Althusser and the French psychoanalyst Lacan. The topics examined are similarly wide-ranging.

The works of William Faulkner are charged with elements of such great diversity that they are an almost inexhaustible resource for study and analysis. One of the most diverse is the subject of this fascinating volume.However alien Faulkner professed popular culture to be to his conception of art and taste, his works are imbued with its inescapable influence. The relationship between Faulkner, a novelist not known for public accessibility, and the culture of the masses makes this an exceptional volume indeed. That the author of dense, riddling novels like The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and other works associated with high modernist art could also appeal to the popular tastes and be influenced by popular culture is a phenomenon made evident in this collection of essays.Faulkner's works reveal that he was drawn to popular culture repeatedly and that this ""lowbrow art"" provided material for his works and for his livelihood. His attempt to write a novel with wide appeal is represented in Sanctuary. His numerous associations with Hollywood and scriptwriting and his publishing stories in popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post pushed Faulkner to modify his literary modernism to the demands of a wider audience.

These ten essays from the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in 1989 at the University of Mississippi, explore the religious themes in William Faulkner's fiction. The papers published here conclude that the key to religious meaning in Faulkner may be that his texts focus not so much on God but on a human aspiration of the divine.

The international reputation and pervasive influence of William Faulkner upon world literature is the subject of the papers In this book.At the Ninth Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in August 1982 at the University of Mississippi, scholars from throughout the world convened to express their admiration for the writings of the Nobel Laureate. For this collection the papers of scholars from Chile, Italy, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Japan, Germany and the United States are assembled from this international forum to assess Faulkner and his works and to answer questions about the extent of his influence.Is Faulkner read overseas? Is he popular? Is Faulkner's ""postage stamp of native soil"" nevertheless universally accessible? As the editors of this collection conclude, ""the name of William Faulkner has become in a household word in far-distant countries."" They find in the responses from scholars representing the nine countries included at the conference that 'everywhere Faulkner was a known quantity; everywhere he was read and admired. Ultimately…Faulkner speaks to the hearts of the people of the world."" Included is a bibliographical appendix listing translations and recent foreign criticism of Faulkner's works.

Reflecting developments in Faulkner criticism, these papers delivered at the 1980 Faulkner and Yoknapatawtha Conference point the way to a new and relatively unexplored avenue of research--the study of relationships among Faulkner's seemingly distinct novels. No longer satisfied to look only at the individual work, critics are instead surveying the whole field of Faulkner's fiction. Many of the lectures collected in this volume direct attention to the full scope and range of Faulkner's fictional world, searching for, and finding, unity, harmony, and interrelationships. Some of the essays, like Ellen Douglas's ""Faulkner in Time"" and James Carothers's ""The Road to The Reivers,"" examine all of Faulkner's novels, seeking to uncover an overall design and meaning. Others trace the appearances, in work after work, of one theme or figure. Among the subjects considered in this way are Faulkner's women, his black characters, his heroes, his aristocrats, and his attitude toward death.Taken together, these essays implicitly acknowledge the appropriateness of metaphor of a cosmos for Faulkner's fictional creation. To be fully and accurately understood, each single part of Faulkner's vast system of fictional meanings, like the separate worlds in a cosmos, must be assessed in the context of the whole.

It began in the 1930s in a powerful and elegant literature arising from a seemingly improbable place, the rural, agrarian South. This literary flowering, a proliferation of Southern letters, is called the Southern Renaissance. Although the definitive history of the Southern literary renaissance has yet to be written, its leading figure, without question, was William Faulkner.Helping to define and describe this startling literary phenomenon and Faulkner's place in it are papers of eight noted scholars included in this collection. Brooks, Rubin, King, Minter, Watkins, Samway, Blackburn, and Spencer, one of the authors whose fiction is identified with the movement, focus their papers upon the philosophical and critical aspects of the Southern Renaissance.

Readers know that humor abounds in the writings of William Faulkner, but the thousands of articles and hundreds of books about his fiction contain little commentary on Faulknerian humor. To give attention to this subject crying out for schlarly treatment, numerous aspects of Faulknerian humor were explored at the Eleventh Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference held in 1984 at the University of Mississippi. Thirteen papers presented at that conference are collected in this volume. Deploring the scholar's tendency to emphasize only Faulkner's serious themes and to neglect the humor that is a natural part of his world, the editors have collected papers showing that humor is not a separate, subordinate part of Faulkner but is indeed at the heart of his writing. The various essays find natural humor even in The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, novels which are traditionally viewed only as tragedies. The elements of Southerwestern humor, folk humor, black humor, and classical comedy emerge from Faulkner's books and give them much of their vigor. Thus Faulkner and Humor offers fresh vision for Faulkner's legions of readers who have seen his fiction as arising only from a dark and forbidding world.