To Market, to Market: "The Portable Faulkner (original) (raw)

The (Not-So-)Private Mind: Why Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury Is and Is Not a Failure

Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2024

Faulkner’s 'The Sound and the Fury' attempts to represent first-person experience in a radical fashion. In what I call (paradoxically) “free indirect discourse in the first person,” Faulkner ostensibly presents both thought thought and thought below the level of awareness together in one stream of text. The Quentin section in particular relies on an idealistic picture of language as meaningful in itself, apart from any intersubjective context or significant use, as though we could bypass communication and look inside Quentin’s head, finding not the brain but the “exact language” of his conscious life. I consider this temptation by way of Wittgenstein’s critique of the privacy of the mental. Wittgenstein’s aim, I argue, is not to deny or demote interiority, but rather to impugn a certain picture of how “the inner” must look — a realm composed of private objects to which the “I” alone has access. I thus suggest that we think of Quentin as an experiment, an appeal. Faulkner tries to reveal a mind in the brutal fullness of its suffering without forcing that mind to address us: to tell us that they suffer. I contend that this appeal fails, and in failing reveals the manner in which the (not-so-private) mind is essentially embedded in a shared, intersubjective world.

Fiction Begot Fiction: An Exploration of Trauma in William Faulkner's Novel The Sound and the Fury

University of Saskatchewan, 2012

“Fiction Begot Fiction,” is a psychobiographical study of William Faulkner, which draws primarily on The Sound and the Fury for its evidence. It is not, strictly speaking, a study of Faulkner’s novel, since the questions it seeks to answer are biographical ones concerning Faulkner’s motivations for writing the novel, and the reasons for its famously elliptical style. Nor is it a conventional literary critical essay, even in the psychobiographical mode, since it relies heavily on red herrings, suspense, and a deus ex machina resolution. It is, therefore, most aptly considered as a specimen of creative non-fiction for which psychobiographical literary criticism provides the foundation. The project offers a defense of conjectural readings of characters’ fictive past traumas, drawn from the work of Esther Rashkin. The author offers her own justification for extending Rashkin’s character-focused approach to the uncovering of an authorial trauma that is figured elliptically in the traumatic and post-traumatic struggles of the novel’s fictional characters. The project provides a provocative “riff” on psychobiographical criticism.

MEANS AND MEANING in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

The works of William Faulkner the Mississippian novelist have struck many readers as complex, obscure and mysterious. This essay attempts to highlight the aesthetic and functional dialectics between Faulkner's complex forms and the correspondingly enigmatic and complex experiences that they communicate, noting especially characterization, narrative points of view, and the symbols in The Sound and the Fury.

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury: the status of the popular in modernism

Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 1999

This paper is an attempt to assess the attitude of a modernist work towards popular culture and the social changes that transformed the United States during the twenties. Its main contention is that modernism's emphasis on epistemology has tended to obscure the conservative stance of many of its creations, apparent in their reaction against the new reconsideration of class and gender brought about by industrialisation and urbanisation. Following a combination of textual and cultural analysis, the paper scrutinises the ways in which Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury negotiates the presence of those social changes.

The Music of the Prose Takes Place in Silence: Sound, Fury, and Faulkner's Negative Audition

Modern Fiction Studies (MFS), 2023

The last decade witnessed a blooming interest in Faulkner's soundscapes, but his conceptualization of readerly listening has yet to be thoroughly discussed. This essay argues that, in The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner cultivates a specific phenomenology—a negative audition—in his reader that holds an ethical valence: an attunement to sonic stimuli, which one is socially and bodily taught to register as inaudible. These internal readerly guidelines paradoxically advance a reading of Faulkner's novel against its own racial bias.

Critical Reception of William Faulkner’s

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica

The history of reception of William Faulkner’s most cherished work,The Sound and the Fury, tellingly reveals the changes that have occurred in reader attitude toward the novel since its first publication in 1929. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the modalities of interpretation employed by three, culturally and historically distinct “interpretive communities” (Fish 1980): American literary critics and reviewers evaluating the novel upon its first publication, Romanian literary critics and reviewers expressing their opinion on the Romanian translation of the novel published in 1971, and contemporary Internet bloggers and commenters discussing their reading experience with the novel.Relying on Hans Robert Jauss’s notions of “aesthetic distance” and “horizon of expectation” (Jauss 1970, 1982), I have raised two questions that I will try to answer at the end of this paper. First, I would like to see whether the literary career ofThe Sound and the Furyfollows the trajectory f...

Jabra\u27s Translation of Faulkner\u27s The Sound and The Fury: A Critical Study

2020

Published in 1929, William Faulkner\u27s The Sound and The Fury was translated in 1961 into Arabic by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, a prominent Arab writer and translator. Through translation, the novel\u27s narrative configurations, especially stream of consciousness, have been of significant influence on Arab literary writers. However, not all of the source text\u27s configurations are accounted for in the translation. This is pertaining to Faulkner\u27s polyphonic design and dialectal structures which are prevalent in Faulkner\u27s text. This study aims at exploring the translation strategies used by the translator to see how these configurations are treated by Jabra. Textual micro-analysis is used to describe how the translator renders the source text, explaining, through macro-analysis, how certain modes of language in the target culture encroach upon the mediation process, and how they constitute a major part of the translational performance as the translator compromises the source tex...

Organized Chaos: Cohesive Devices in Benjy’s Sections of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 2016

As the history of criticism onAlthough critical voices that reproach the writer for the incoherence of Benjy’s narrative may be justified at first sight, a closer inspection reveals that it is much less incoherent than it appears. In my paper, I will argue that there are several ways in which the author helps the reader to construct a more or less coherent story line out of the fragmented events that happened in the course of about thirty years. Secondly, I want to demonstrate that functional-semantic approaches to text analysis, such as Systemic Functional Grammar or Text Linguistics, can be effectively employed in analysing and interpreting literary texts. Finally, I try to find a psychological explanation of how Benjy’s incoherence is made readable by the interworking between the coherence-seeking dispositions of the reader and the ingenious cohesive devices used by the writer.