美国文学 作家 威廉·福克纳.ppt

1、William Faulkner,18971962,His life and writing His major works Yoknapatawpha County as the setting His thematic pattern His narrative techniques His language,His life and writing,Faulkner is the most powerful and eloquent representative of American Southern writers. American Southern writers mainly

2、write about the history, customs, people and social change of the American South, a region that contains much beauty, violence, passion, courage and, finally tragedy. It was from the regions characteristics that Faulkner drew the material for most of his fiction.,Southern Literature,I. HeritageAmeri

3、can southern literature can date back to Edgar Allen Poe, and reach its summit with the appearance of the two “giants” Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe. There are southern women writers Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Flannery OConnor. II. Southern Myths guilt, failure, poverty1. Chevalier heritag

4、e2. Agrarian virtue3. Plantation aristocracy4. Lost cause5. White supremacy6. Purity of womanhood Southern literature: twisted, pessimistic, violent, distortedGothic novel: Poe,born in New Albany, Mississippi and raised in nearby Oxford, and lived there almost all his life. left school in his teens

5、and later studied as a special student at the Uni. of Mississippi. Fond of literature, he was increasingly motivated to become a writer. In 1918, he enlisted in the British Royal Flying Corps. Later he travelled Europe and learned the experimental writing of James Joyce and of the ideas of Sigmund F

6、reud. He died of a heart attack in Oxford, Mississippi.,literary career: three stages,(1) 19241929: training as a writer The Marble Faun Soldiers Pay Mosquitoes(2) 19291936: most productive and prolific period Sartoris The Sound and the Fury As I Lay Dying Light in August Absalom, Absalom!(3) 1940en

7、d: won recognition in America Go Down, Moses,His major works,a volume of poetry The Marble Faun (1924) first novel Soldiers Pay (1926) Sartoris (l929) In writing it, he began to see and feel the dignity and sorrow of what was to become his most frequently used subject matter. The Sound and the Fury,

8、 considered as the work of a major writer. His other major works include As I Lay Dying (l930), Light in August (l932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Wild Palms (1939) The Hamlet (1940). The Unvanquished (1938) Go Down, Moses (1942) These works are thematically interwoven.,An anthology of his writings:

9、The Portable Faulkner. In l950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for the anti-racist Intruder in the Dust (1948). His other remarkable novels include Requiem for a Nun (l951), The Fable (1954), The Town (1957) The Mansion (1959),His point of viewHe generally shows a grim picture of human society where

10、 violence and cruelty are frequently included, but his later works showed more optimism. His intention was to show the evil, harsh events in contrast to such eternal virtues as love, honor, pity, compassion, self-sacrifice, and thereby expose the faults of society. He felt that it was a writers duty

11、 to remind his readers constantly of true values and virtues.,Of Faulkners literary works, four novels are masterpieces by any standards: The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. The Sound and the Fury is his acclaimed masterpiece, an account of the tragic downf

12、all of the Compson family.,“The Sound and the Fury” : a Southern Gothic novel, which makes use of the stream of consciousness narrative technique pioneered by European authors such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The novel takes place in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County and is split into four s

13、ections: the first from the viewpoint of Benjy Compson, a mentally retarded man; the second from the point of view of Quentin Compson, a depressed college student; the third from the point of view of their sardonic, embittered brother, Jason Compson; and the fourth section from a third person limite

14、d omniscient narrative point-of-view, centering on Dilsey, the Compson familys black servant, and expounding on religious faith. Benjy and Quentins sections are written in a stream of consciousness style.,It is a story of lost innocence, which proves itself to be an intensification of the theme of i

15、mprisonment in the past. Faulkner develops the theme of deterioration and loss by juxtaposing the childhood of the Compson brothers with their present experience. As a result, the novel not merely relates Quentins nostalgic feeling about the past, or a Southern family that remains trapped within its

16、 past, but conveys a strong sense of grief over the deterioration of the South from the past to the present.,The major concern of Light in August is primarily about the South as a state of mind. In this novel, different attitudes towards life - plainly obsessions with the past, with blood or race an

17、d solely concern with bringing forth and preserving life - represented by different major characters.,Absalom, Absalom! is a novel entirely of the attempts to explain the past, characterized by involutions of narrative structure. It is immensely complex. Published in 1936, Absalom, Absalom! is Faulk

18、ners ninth novel and one of his more admired.,It is the story of Thomas Sutpen and his ruthless, single-minded attempt to forge a dynasty in Jefferson, Mississippi, in 1830. Although his grand design is ultimately destroyed by his own sons, a century later the figure of Sutpen continues to haunt you

19、ng Quentin Compson, who is obsessed with his legacy and that of the Old South.,Go Down, Moses is in a sense a companion piece to Absalom, Absalom! but at the same time another and very different attempt to handle the Southern reality of land, family and the plantation as a form of life. In this book

20、, Faulkner illuminates the problem of black and white in Southern society as a close-knit destiny of blood brotherhood.,The best story to highlight Faulkners concern is The Bear in which the view of the moral abomination of slavery and the human entanglements goes beyond history, to the beginnings,

21、to the mythic time. In this story, Faulkner skillfully employs an old crafty bear as a symbol of the timeless freedom of the wilderness.,Yoknapatawpha County as the setting,Most of Faulkners works are set in the American South, with his emphasis on the Southern subjects and consciousness. They are a

22、bout people from a small region in Northern Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha County, which is actually an imaginary place based on Faulkners childhood memory about the town of Oxford in his native Lafayette County. With his rich imagination, Faulkner turned the land, the people and the history of the regi

23、on into a literary creation and a mythical kingdom.,The Yoknapatawpha stories deal, generally, with the historical period from the Civil War up to the 1920s when the First World War broke out, and people of a stratified society, the aristocrats, the new rich, the poor whites, and the blacks. As a re

24、sult, Yoknapatawpha County has become an allegory or a parable of the Old South, with which Faulkner has managed successfully to show a panorama of the experience and consciousness of the whole Southern society. The Yoknapatawpha saga is Faulkners real achievement.,The thematic pattern:,Most of the

25、major themes are directly related to the tragic collision or confrontation between the old South and the new South (or the civilized modern society) represented by different characters in his novels.,themes,(1) History and raceHe explains the present by examining the past, by telling the stories of

26、several generations of family to show how history changes life. He was interested in the relationship between blacks and whites, especially concerned about the problems of the people who were of the mixed race of black and white, unacceptable to both races. (Mulattoes) (2) Deterioration(3) Conflicts

27、 between generations, classes, races, man and environment(4) Horror, violence and the abnormal,(1) Faulkner exemplified T. S. Eliots concept of modern society as a wasteland in a dramatic way. He lamented the decline of the old South and condemned the mechanized, industrialized society which has deh

28、umanized man by forcing him to cultivate false values and decrease those essential human values such as love, courage, fortitude, honesty and goodness. Faulkner held tolerance and compassion with traditional values such as serenity and elegance on one hand, and recognized the need to redefine and re

29、affirm them on the other.,(2) The past and the present, nature and society are always juxtaposed in his works. Almost all of his protagonists turn out to be tragic because they are prisoners of the past, or of the society, or of some social and moral taboos, or of their own introspective personaliti

30、es. By describing his protagonists the way he does, Faulkner suggests that society, which conditions man with its hierarchical stratification and with its laws, the civilization and social institutions, eliminates mans chance of responding naturally to the experiences of his existence. Man, turning

31、away from reality by alienating himself from truth with his attempts to explain the inexplicable, becomes weak and cowardly, confused and ineffectual.,style/features of his works,(1) complex plot(2) stream of consciousness(3) multiple points of view, circular form(4) violation of chronology(5) court

32、room rhetoric: formal language(6) characterization: he was able to probe into the psychology of characters(7) “anti-hero”: weak, feeble, vulnerable (true people in modern society)He has a group of women writers following him, including OConnor and Eudora Welty,Faulkners narrative techniques:,He has

33、always been regarded as a man with great might of invention and experimentation. He added to the theory of the novel as an art form and evolved his own literary strategies.,(1) Withdrawal of the author as a controlling narrator: To him, the primary duty of a writer was to explore and represent the i

34、nfinite possibilities inherent in human life. Therefore a writer should observe with no judgment whatsoever and reduce authorial intrusion to the lowest minimum.,(2) Dislocation of the narrative time: The most characteristic way of structuring his stories is to fragment the chronological time. He de

35、liberately broke up the chronology of his narrative by juxtaposing the past with the present, in the way the montage does in a movie.,(3) The modern stream-of-consciousness technique and the interior monologue: Stream-of-consciousness technique was frequently and skillfully exploited by Faulkner to

36、emphasize the reactions and inner musings of the narrator. And the interior monologue helps him achieve the most desirable effect of exploring the nature of human consciousness.,(4) Multiple points of view: The employment of several narrators or narrative points of view to tell a story, thus making

37、the structure of the book somewhat radiative. For example, The Sound and the Fury uses four different narrative voices to piece together the story and thus challenges the reader by presenting a fragmented plot told from multiple points of view.,(5) The other narrative techniques he used to construct

38、 his stories include symbolism and mythological and biblical allusions.,Faulkners language,He was a master of his own particular style of writing. Great writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and James Joyce all had a part in influencing Faulkner. His prose, marked by long

39、 and embedded sentences, complex syntax, and vague reference pronouns and a variety of registers of the English language, is very difficult to read. In contrast, Faulkner could sound very casual or informal sometimes. He captured the dialects of the Mississippi characters. Most of the symbols and im

40、ageries are drawn from nature.,Selected Reading: Barn Burning,a short story, appeared in Harpers in 1938. deals with class conflicts, the influence of fathers, and vengeance as viewed through the third-person perspective of a young, impressionable child. a prequel to The Hamlet, The Town, and The Ma

41、nsion - the Snopes trilogy.,The story opens with Abner Snopes, the father of young Sartoris Snopes, being driven out of town after burning down a neighboring farmers barn. The neighbor was able to save his animals but not the barn. No palpable proof can point to Abner as the culprit, which allows him to evade the usually severe punishment for such a grave crime.,The Snopes family is ordered to move along to begin life anew, but Abner Snopes cannot seem to control his pyromania (纵火狂)and hatred for society. He is portrayed as a man who, as it is put i