美国文学13 faulkner.ppt

William Faulkner Father of Southern American literature I. Life experience William Faulkner (1897-1962), the first and most important southern writer to emerge in the postwar years, ranks among the leading American authors of the twentieth century. wrote altogether 18 novels and three volumes of short stories. won Nobel Prize for literature in 1950. He was born in a distinguished Mississippi family that had once played an important role in state politics. lived in Oxford from early childhood, and was educated at the university there joined the Canadian, and later the British, Royal Air Force during the First World War worked in a bookstore in New York wrote descriptive sketches for news-papers while living with Sherwood Anderson in New Orleans Except for some trips to Europe and Asia, and a few brief stays in Hollywood as a scriptwriter, he worked on his novels and short stories on a farm in Oxford. II. Special features 2.1. Setting Oxford is the model for his fictional Jefferson, the central place of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County 2.2. Subjects southern tradition, family, community, the land, history and the past, race, and the passions of ambition and love 2.3. Characters Typical of the historical growth and subsequent decadence of the South To him his characters were real and constant and moved in his mind all the time. 2.4. The theme of history Most of his novels are about the decay of the old South, as represented by the Sartoris and Compson families, and the emergence of ruthless and brash [confident in a rude or aggressive way] newcomers, such as the Snopeses. The human drama in Faulkners novels is then built on the model of the actual, historical drama extending over almost a century and a half. Each story and each novel contributes to the construction of a whole, which is the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants. The theme of racial prejudice In Light in August (1932), prejudice is shown to be most destructive when it is internal