William Faulkner was an odd, but outstanding man. He lived a life as an alcoholic. However, through these dark times Faulkner created outstanding literary works. These works tell how we should live, and not let ourselves become engulfed in the everyday battles between family, racial, and sexual differences. Faulkner received a Nobel Prize in 1949 for his powerful and unique contribution to the Modern American Novel ("The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949").
Through a variety of characters and situations, William Faulkner presents, questions, praises, and condemns the South's view of social standing. “Faulkner well understood his society's system of class, caste, and race -- wealthy landowners, middle-class whites, poor whites, 'white trash,' and then blacks (who were actually not on the bottom of the ladder but separate from the rest)-as he also well understood the problems inherent in such a system.” (Wilhelm, Hamblin, Stoneback, Peek, Skaggs, Reading, Urgo, Vanderwerken, Doyle, Carvill, Tebbetts, Luscher, Watson, Kinney, Brodsky, Zender, Rowley, Wharton, and Hahn 75).
Faulkner understood that, the Old South (before the Civil War) was built on a social and economic system that could survive only by maintaining the many roles in every segment of society. The wellbeing of the whole depended on the separation, and of each of its parts: Carefully guarded divisions between classes, genders, and races kept the structure intact. Thus, it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get out of your social class. After the Civil War, the circumstances changed, and yet the New South retained much of the old traditions on which it was founded. Faulkner examines the Old South and New South, how they change, how they fail to change, and h...
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...terature 1949. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Feb. 2014.
Wilhelm, Arthur, Robert W. Hamblin, H. R. Stoneback, Charles A. Peek, Merrill M. Skaggs, Further Reading, Joseph R. Urgo, David L. Vanderwerken, Don H. Doyle, Caroline Carvill, Terrell L. Tebbetts, Robert M. Luscher, James G. Watson, Arthur F. Kinney, Louis Daniel Brodsky, Karl F. Zender, Rebecca Rowley, Larry Wharton, and Stephen Hahn. "C." A William Faulkner Encyclopedia. Ed. Robert W. Hamblin and Charles A. Peek. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. 58-91. Questia. Web. 14 Feb. 2014.
Williamson, Joel. William Faulkner and Southern History. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Questia. Web. 14 Feb. 2014.
---. William Faulkner and Southern History. New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Questia. Web. 14 Feb. 2014.
Yoder, Edwin M., Jr. "Faulkner and Race: Art and Punditry." The Virginia Quarterly Review 73.4 (1997): 565+. Questia. Web. 14 Feb. 2014.
Appealing to both people of the North and South, Reed accurately describes many traits and qualities of Southerners in his opening paragraph, “You’re in the American South now, a proud region with distinctive history and culture” (17). He effectively employs pathos throughout his introduction and captures the reader’s attention from the beginning by saying, “Where churches preach against, ‘cigarettes, whiskey, and wild, wild women’ and American football is a religion” (17), thus immediately appealing to peoples traditional values. While cigarettes, whiskey, and wild, wild women have values in the Southern culture, not all churches in th...
Imagine a historian, author of an award-winning dissertation and several books. He is an experienced lecturer and respected scholar; he is at the forefront of his field. His research methodology sets the bar for other academicians. He is so highly esteemed, in fact, that an article he has prepared is to be presented to and discussed by the United States’ oldest and largest society of professional historians. These are precisely the circumstances in which Ulrich B. Phillips wrote his 1928 essay, “The Central Theme of Southern History.” In this treatise he set forth a thesis which on its face is not revolutionary: that the cause behind which the South stood unified was not slavery, as such, but white supremacy. Over the course of fourteen elegantly written pages, Phillips advances his thesis with evidence from a variety of primary sources gleaned from his years of research. All of his reasoning and experience add weight to his distillation of Southern history into this one fairly simple idea, an idea so deceptively simple that it invites further study.
William Faulkner’s short story “Barn Burning” describes a typical relationship between wealthy people and poor people during the Civil War.
16. James Hinkle and Robert McCoy, Reading Faulkner: The Unvanquished. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 141.
Cobb, James C. Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity. Oxford University Press. 2005. Print.
Both of these authors’ short stories cover the changing south. Both of their short stories give us a profound impact on the thinking of these two men when it comes to their views of the south. Coming from different backgrounds this gives the reader a good view of what the overall picture of the south looked like at the time. Faulkner and Ellis disagreed about how differences were handled in the south and whether the changing south was good or bad, but they both of them agreed that the south changing was unavoidable.
Racism was and forever will be a dark part of the American past, and no one can change that, no matter how many books one may alter. In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it, many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding. (Twain 2)
and learn to grow up the right way in a racial environment. Faulkner's setting is one of
Faulkner uses the view point of an unnamed town member while he uses a third person perspective to show the general corrosion of the southern town’s people.
William Faulkner was a twentieth century American author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Most famous for his novel The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner defines Southern literature. In his mythical county of Yaknapatawpha, Faulkner contrasted the past with the present era. The past was represented in Emily Grierson, Colonel Sartoris, the Board of Alderman, and the Negro servant. Homer Barron, the new Board of Alderman, and the new sheriff represented the present.
On September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, a son was born to Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Faulkner. This baby, born into a proud, genteel Southern family, would become a mischievous boy, an indifferent student, and drop out of school; yet “his mother’s faith in him was absolutely unshakable. When so many others easily and confidently pronounced her son a failure, she insisted that he was a genius and that the world would come to recognize that fact” (Zane). And she was right. Her son would become one of the most exalted American writers of the 20th century, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and two Pulitzers during his lifetime. Her son was William Faulkner.
Brooks, Cleanth. "William Faulkner: Visions of Good and Evil." Faulkner, New Perspectives. Ed. Richard H. Brodhead. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Prentice-Hall, 1983.
In the early 1900s, the American South had very distinctive social classes: African Americans, poor white farmers, townspeople, and wealthy aristocrats. This class system is reflected in William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying, where the Bundrens a poor, white family, are on a quest to bury their now deceased wife and mother, Addie in the town of Jefferson. Taking a Marxist criticism approach to As I Lay Dying, readers notice how Faulkner’s use of characterization reveals how country folk are looked down upon by the wealthy, upper class townspeople.
Faulkner's style may give you trouble at first because of (1) his use of long, convoluted, and sometimes ungrammatical sentences, such as the one just quoted; (2) his repetitiveness (for example, the word "bleak" in the sentence just quoted); and (3) his use of oxymorons, that is, combinations of contradictory or incongruous words (for example, "frictionsmooth," "slow and ponderous gallop," "cheerful, testy voice"). People who dislike Faulkner see this style as careless. Yet Faulkner rewrote and revised Light in August many times to get the final book exactly the way he wanted it. His style is a product of thoughtful deliberation, not of haste. Editors sometimes misunderstood Faulkner's intentions and made what they thought were minor changes. Recently scholars have prepared an edition of Light in August that restores the author's original text as exactly as possible. This Book Note is based on that Library of America edition (1985), edited by Noel Polk and Joseph Blotner.
Within his criticism of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Gregory Fowler uses examples from both the book and Mark Twain’s own life to discuss the different ways in which racism has morphed. Instead of analyzing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn critically and solely, Gregory Fowler critically analyzes parts of the book and its effect to prove the different ways in which slaver morphs through the uses of allusions, exemplifications, and anecdotes.