Hugh M. Ruppersburg examines the use of narrative viewpoint and structure in four representative novels by William Faulkner: Light in August, Pylon, Requiem for a Nun, and Absalom, Absalom! In his discussion of these four works he refers frequently, and often at length, to Faulkner's other novels and stories, so that the book offers a comprehensive examination of the narrative principle that underlie Faulkner's literary achievement. Ruppersburg shows how the Nobel Prize-winning novelist employed a number of elements to guarantee the impersonality of his fiction--how he built his novels primarily around the speech and thoughts of his characters. The absence of a judgmental authorial or narrational voice, says Ruppersburg, compels the reader to reach his own judgment concerning the behavior of these characters as well as the meaning and value of the fiction. By fusing a number of individual perspectives into a composite perspective, Faulkner gives the community itself a voice. He also uses narrative viewpoint to dramatize the individual's search for identity and the nature of truth, time, history, and human consciousness. Most significantly, the author says, Faulkner's manipulation of character perspective forces the reader to participate in the narrative process on the same level as that of the fictional characters. Voice and Eye in Faulkner's Fiction is primarily intended for the literature teacher and specialist, but it is directed as well to all readers curious about Faulkner's methods and the ways in which his novels work.

A bold book, built of close readings, striking in its range and depth, The Signifying Eye shows Faulkner's art take shape in sweeping arcs of social, labor, and aesthetic history. Beginning with long-unpublished works (his childhood sketches and his hand-drawn and handillustrated play The Marionettes) and early novels (Mosquitoes and Sartoris), working through many major works (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!), and including more popular fictions (The Wild Palms and The Unvanquished) and late novels (notably Intruder in the Dust and The Town), The Signifying Eye reveals Faulkner's visual obsessions with artistic creation as his work is read next to Wharton, Cather, Toomer, and—in a tour de force intervention—Willem de Kooning. After coloring in southern literature as a "reverse slave narrative," Waid's Eye locates Faulkner's fiction as the "feminist hinge" in a crucial parable of art that seeks abstraction through the burial of the race-defined mother. Race is seen through gender and sexuality while social fall is exposed (in Waid's phrase) as a "coloring of class." Locating "visual language" that constitutes a "pictorial vocabulary," The Signifying Eye delights in literacy as the oral meets the written and the abstract opens as a site to see narrative. Steeped in history, this book locates a heightened reality that goes beyond representation to bring Faulkner's novels, stories, and drawings into visible form through Whistler, Beardsley, Gorky, and de Kooning. Visionary and revisionist, Waid has painted the proverbial big picture, changing the fundamental way that both the making of modernism and the avant-garde will be seen. A Friends Fund publication

Fiction. With raw, lyrical ferocity, ALL THE COMFORT SIN CAN PROVIDE delves into the beguiling salve that sin can promise--tracing those hidden places most of us are afraid to acknowledge. In this collection of brutally unsentimental short stories, Grant Faulkner chronicles dreamers, addicts, and lost souls who have trusted too much in wayward love, the perilous balm of substances, or the unchecked hungers of others, but who are determined to find salvation in their odd definitions of transcendence. Taking us from hot Arizona highways to cold Iowa hotel rooms, from the freedoms of the backwoods of New Mexico to the damnations of slick New York City law firms, Faulkner creates a shard-sharp mosaic of desire that careens off the page--honest, cutting, and wise.

Faulkner scholarship is one of the largest critical enterprises currently at work. Because of its size and scope, accessing that scholarship has become difficult for scholars, students, and general readers alike. This reference includes chapters on individual approaches to Faulkner studies, including archetypal, historical, biographical, feminist, and psychological criticism, among others. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and surveys the contributions of that approach to Faulkner scholarship. The volume concludes with a selected, general bibliography and glossary of critical terms. William Faulkner is one of the most widely read and studied American writers. His works have also generated a vast body of scholarship and elicited criticism from a wide range of approaches. Because of its size, scope, and diversity, accessing that scholarship has become difficult for scholars, students, and general readers alike. This reference comprehensively overviews the present state of Faulkner studies. The volume includes chapters written by expert contributors. Each chapter defines a particular critical approach and surveys the contributions of that approach to Faulkner studies. Some of the approaches covered are archetypal, biographical, feminist, historical, and psychological, among others. The book closes with a selected, general bibliography and glossary of critical terms.

Delving deep into the intricate narrative styles of William Faulkner's most celebrated works, this captivating study immerses readers in the renowned author's rich and masterful storytelling techniques. By incorporating the rigorous theoretical frameworks of Mikhail Bakhtin's polyphony and dialogism and Tzvetan Todorov's insights, the study unveils Faulkner's unparalleled ability to craft a myriad of unique, autonomous characters and narrative voices. Emphasizing Faulkner's innovative narrative prowess, including his adept use of multiple perspectives, narrative levels, and stylistic choices, this exploration offers readers an exhilarating glimpse into the profound and complex world of Faulkner's literary works. Get ready to embark on an enthralling journey through the captivating storytelling universe of one of literature's greatest visionaries!

Forensic Fictions is the first book-length critical study of William Faulkner's fictional depictions of the legal vocation and the practice of law. Examining Faulkner's lawyer characters in light of the southern storytelling tradition, Jay Watson argues that the forensic competence of the Faulknerian lawyer is a direct function of his skill as a raconteur. To trace the biographical and historical roots of Faulkner's lifelong preoccupation with the legal profession, Watson draws on contemporary scholarship in narrative, rhetoric, jurisprudence, legal and intellectual history, literary theory, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. His approach yields insightful readings of forensic characters and scenes from such works as "An Odor of Verbena," The Hamlet, "Wild Palms," Absalom, Absalom! and The Reivers. Watson shows the links between storytelling and the competence of Faulkner's legal characters by examining the intertextual logic that connects the two most important lawyers in the Yoknapatawpha fiction: the incompetent Horace Benbow and the more capable Gavin Stevens, whose entrance into Faulkner's oeuvre coincides with Benbow's untimely departure from it. Focusing on the nine novels in which these two characters appear, Watson traces the evolutionary process by which Stevens supplants Benbow. Three of the Stevens novels--Intruder in the Dust, Knight's Gambit, and Requiem for a Nun--from what Watson calls Faulkner's "forensic trilogy" and, when read together, constitute the writer's most sustained investigation of the rhetorical and ethical responsibilities of the lawyer-citizen. Faulkner, Watson argues, saw the forensic figure as a potential hybrid of homo loquens and homo politicus, capable of combing the roles of storyteller, rhetorician, and theatrical performer with those of critic, citizen, and ethical man. As such, this figure served as a provocative authorial surrogate through whom Faulkner could explore diverse and often contradictory aspects of his personal experience, his family background, his cultural heritage, and, most of all, his own artistic use of language.

“Will leave you feeling happier, bolder, and ridiculously excited about diving back into your writing projects.” —Chris Baty, author of No Plot? No Problem! and founder of NaNoWriMo Every writer knows that as rewarding as the creative process is, it can often be a bumpy road. Have hope and keep at it! Designed to kick-start creativity, this handbook from the executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) gathers a wide range of insights and advice for writers at any stage of their career. From tips about how to finally start that story to helpful ideas about what to do when the words just aren’t quite coming out right, Pep Talks for Writers provides motivation, encouragement, and helpful exercises for writers of all stripes.

This study argues that Faulkner's writings about racial matters interrogated rather than validated his racial beliefs and that, in the process of questioning his own ideology, his fictional forms extended his reach as an artist. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1950, Faulkner wrote what critics term "his later novels." These have been almost uniformly dismissed, with the prevailing view being that as he became a more public figure, his fiction became a platform rather than a canvas. Within this context Faulkner on the Color Line redeems the novels in the final phase of his career by interpreting them as Faulkner's way of addressing the problem of race in America. They are seen as a series of formal experiments Faulkner deliberately attempted as he examined the various cultural functions of narrative, most particularly those narratives that enforce American racial ideology. The first chapters look at the ways in which the ability to assert oneself verbally informs matters of individual and cultural identity in both the widely studied works of Faulkner's major phase and those in his later career. Later chapters focus on the last works, providing detailed readings of Intruder in the Dust, Requiem for a Nun, the Snopes trilogy, A Fable, and The Reivers. The book examines Faulkner as he confronted the vexing questions of race in these novels and assesses the identity of Faulkner as the Nobel Prize winner who claimed on many occasions that he was "tired," maybe "written out." In his decision not to speak in the identity of the Black people represented in his fiction, in his decision to write instead about the complexities of all racial constructions, he produced a host of characters suffering within the rigid protocols on race that had been enforced in America for centuries. As a private, white individual, he could never be other than what he was. Rather than attempt to reconcile Faulkner the public man with the private one, however, this study concludes that through his fiction Faulkner the artist questioned himself and came to understand others across the color line.

Creating Yoknapatawpha is a study of the crucial interplay of reading and writing processes involved in constructing the textual environment of William Faulkner’s work, and the nature and significance of the world created by these many forces. Yoknapatawpha County, the author contends, is the product of these mainly mental processes of construction at all levels, and it is in the similar and even analogous situations that exist between readers and writers of and in the fiction that the dynamic of Faulkner’s work is most keenly discovered. The book discusses novels from throughout Faulkner’s career, and uses elements of Bakhtinian and reader-response theory, among others, to explore its subject, eschewing the limited focus both of strictly formal and more content-oriented approaches, and demonstrating the need for readers and writers to work together, whether harmoniously or otherwise. By examining the fictive nature of Yoknapatawpha, and the requirement for everybody to participate fully in its creation, we can establish useful bases for investigations into the ‘real world’ issues with which Faulkner is so concerned.

On that paradoxical premise, Faulkner's theory addresses the writer's dilemma of having only the inadequate word to surmount itself; and the practice in fiction seeks to vanquish the enemy, not in the wordless, as it is often denoted, but in silence past the word."--BOOK JACKET.