William Faulkner`s Absalom, Absalom!-Handout

소개글

The Modes of Expression used
in W. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!

A. The Gothic Mode

1. The General Ingredients of the Literary Gothicism and the Gothic Fiction (Kerr 4-6):
- a fiction evocative of the sublime, of the dark persistence of the past in sublime ruin, haunted relic, and hereditary curse, of a post-Enlightenment preoccupation with the preternatural, the irrational, the abnormal, and the unconscious.
- a Calvinistic Manichaean polarity of good and evil and / or ambivalence in the moral attitudes of characters; the expression of a fundamentally Protestant theological or religious disquietude
- the abandonment of realism as a major aim [and the use of cubist, existential, mystery, and surrealist modes, with the motifs of detection and mystery]
- the use of setting and atmosphere to create the terror and horror, which the reader shares with the characters

목차

A.The Gothic Mode
B. The Mode of Detective Story
C. The Tragic Mode
D. The Mode of Historical Novel.
E. The Reflexive Mode—The novel about what it is (Boyd 68-73)

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2. The Specific Ingredients of the Gothic Fiction:
- A castle with its secret passages and mysterious occurrences
- A villainous usurper; suffering heroines; its dispossessed hero, an antihero who asserts his existence mainly as a victim of the nightmare
- themes of inheritance, heir, and fate
- its play upon sadistic and masochistic emotions; its unbridled sexuality and sensuality; its appeal to terror and horror; its exposure of the underside of human nature
- prevalence of taboo subjects such as incest or narcissism, homosexuality, perversion, miscegenation
- motifs of flight with the sense of impotence, of ruins expressing visually the revolutionary horror of the collapse of the feudal period, of ghosts denoting the apprehension of the return of the power of the past, of quest implying the hero’s search for identity, and of purposeful wandering
- techniques of detection, mystery, and suspense
- scenes of violence

* Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism places the “ghost stories, thrillers, and Gothic romances” within the sixth phase of comedy, “the phase of the collapse and disintegration of society” (quoted in Kerr 6).

3. American Gothic Fiction (L. Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel, quoted in Kerr 8):
- projects “certain obsessive concerns of our national life: the ambiguity of our relationship with the Indian and Negro, the ambiguity of our encounter with nature, the guilt of the revolutionist who feels himself a parricide—and... ...the uneasiness of the writer who cannot help believing that the very act of composing a book is Satanic revolt.

참고 자료

Boyd, Michael. The Reflexive Novel: Fiction as Critique. Lewisburg: Bucknell
UP, 1983.
Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha County. New York:
Yale UP, 1963.
Donnelly, Colleen. “Compelled to believe: Historiography and Truth in Absalom,
Absalom!” Style 25 (1991): 104ff. Http://www.elibrary.com/id/2525/getdoc.
egi?id=53340768xOy496
Doyle, Don. “The World that Created William Faulkner.” Southern Review 30
(1994) : 615ff. Http://www.elibrary.com/id/2525/getdoc.cgi?id=53341651xOy
75 9
Howe, Irving. William Faulkner: A Critical Study. 3rd Ed. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1975.
Kerr, Elizabeth M. William Faulkner’s Gothic Domain. Port Washington, N.Y.:
National Univ. Publications, 1979.
Poland, Tim. “Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” Explicator 50 (1992): 239ff.
Wadlington, Warwick. Reading Faulknerian Tragedy. New York: Cornell UP,
1987.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction.
New Accents. London: Methuen, 1984.