A brief introduction to Faulkner

1. William Faulkner

2. Contents
1. Birth & Death
2. Youth
3. Works
4. Awards
5. Summary

3. 1. Birth &
Death
1897-1962
Mississippi

4. 2. Youth
A Southern family with a fairly long
tradition
The town of Oxford----
fictional Yoknapatawpha county
Yoknapatawpha saga 约克纳帕塔法世系小说
The members of his family----
fictional characters
A literary background

5. 3.1 Occupation(1919–62)
Novelist----19
The Sound and the Fury 《喧哗与骚动》
Light in August 《八月之光》
Absalom, Absalom! 《押沙龙》
Go Down, Moses 《去吧，摩西》
Short story writer ----70+
All relating to the American South

6. 3.2 Ambiguous attitude toward the
southern “aristocratic” families:
①Criticism of their injustice ②Pity & sympathy
to the African Americans
“beneath a mass of
“a fallen monument” ---- bought flowers”----
a glory gone with the dignity, inspiring
wind wonder & admiration
Stubborn, asocial, out of The golden era ---- an
step with modern life ideal to look back to
“A Rose for Emily“ (1931)

7. the reason for his choice of the title as:
[The title] was an allegorical title; the
meaning was, here was a woman who
has had a tragedy, an irrevocable tragedy
and nothing could be done about it, and I
pitied her and this was a salute ... to a
woman you would hand a rose.

8. 3.3 Genre
a “ghost story” ---- Faulkner
‘‘read variously as a Gothic horror
tale, a study in abnormal psychology,
an allegory of the relations between
North and South, a meditation on the
nature of time, and a tragedy with
Emily as a sort of tragic heroine.’’
---- Frank A. Littler

9. 3.3 Genre
Paragraph 30 ---- “she had grown fat and
her hair was turning gray……grayer and
grayer……pepper-and-salt iron-gray……Up
to the day of her death……still that
vigorous iron-gray”
Paragraph 41----“in the second pillow was
the indentation of a head……a long strand
of iron-gray hair”

10. 3.4 Style
Stream of consciousness (interior
monologues)
Difficult language (no capitalization, no
proper punctuation, long sentences, etc.)
A variety of registers (colloquial —regional
dialects — formal)
Great imagination (a simple true story of
human life—an elaborate mythology) “I
am inclined to think that my material, the
South, is not very important to me. I just
happen to know it.”

11. 4. Awards
The 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature
"his powerful and artistically unique contribution
to the modern American novel."
Two Pulitzer Prizes
Two National Book Rewards

12. 5. Summary
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
American South
Human nature & behaviour
Gothic
Complex language In 1987, the US Postal
Service issued a 22-cent
Stream of consciousness postage stamp in his honor
Imagination
America’s greatest novelist of the 20th century