美国文学课件14The Literature of the Modernist Period教材课程.pptVIP

The Literature of the Modernist Period (4) Chapter 5 Ⅰ. William Faulkner (1897-1962) Born in New Albany, Mississippi An old white upper class family: “Colonel Sartoris” Incomplete formal education Trained as a pilot for the British Royal Flying Corps in World War I As a writer, his invention of the mythical Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi “I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about, and that by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top. It opened up a gold mine of other people, so I created a cosmos of my own.” Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County Repetition was rediscovery. “I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world.” Interpenetration of past and present “No man is himself. He is the sum of his past.” No system is ever complete or completely adequate. Faulkner published almost twenty novels, several volumes of short fiction, and two volumes of poetry. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1950). A complex time order Death of Emily The tax event The smell The death of her father Her dates with Homer Buying Arsenic Her marriage in vain Her death The reveal of the secret A linear timeline:  The death of her father The tax event Her dates with Homer Her marriage in vain Buying Arsenic The smell Death of Emily The reveal of the secret Making sense of the events The greatness of the story lies not in making the plot linear. Instead, it is great because Faulkner leaves us horrified as we discover, bit by bit, the mystery of Emily Grieson’s life. The reader experiences an epiphany. The narrator’s shifting point of view Who is the unnamed narrator? The collective pronoun we How does he look at Emily? “our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the ins