William Faulkner and History
In order to fully understand importance of history and the past in Faulkner’s writing, it is first necessary to examine the life he lived and the place that shaped it. William Cuthbert Falkner (the “u” was later added via his own accord) was born September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi (Padgett). Named for his great-grandfather Colonel Falkner, young William was told countless stories as a boy of the old Colonel and other great heroes of the South. Faulkner himself described the process of embellishment subjected to one story told by his Aunt over time:
…as [Aunt Jenny] grew older the tale itself grew richer and richer, taking on a mellow splendor like wine; until what had been a hare-brained prank of two heedless and reckless boys wild with their own youth had become a gallant and finely tragical focal point to which the history of the race had been raised from out the old miasmic swamps of spiritual sloth by two angels valiantly fallen and strayed, altering the course of human evens and purging the souls of men.
(Howe, 13)
Perhaps it is from these stories that he developed his own knack for historical and literary invention. “As a boy Faulkner did not need to study the history of the South: he lived in its shadow and experienced its decline” (Howe, 13), writes Irving Howe when describing Faulkner’s youth and education in the South. Rather than learn the history of his country via books and conventional methods, Faulkner lived it in the games of Civil War that he and his friends played as children. He grew up knowing “about Vicksburg and Corinth and exactly where his grandfather’s regiment had been ...
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...napatawpha, 1995. Ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Jackson, 1997. 3-38.
Faulkner, William. “Banquet Speech.” Nobelprize.org. City Hall, Stockholm. 10 Dec. 1950. 17 Nov. 2004 <http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html>.
Foster, Thomas C. “History, Private Consciousness, and Narrative Form in Go Down, Moses.” The Centennial Review. 28 (1984): 61-76.
Howe, Irving. William Faulkner: A Critical Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951. 11-21.
Millgate, Michael. “Faulkner and History.” The South and Faulkner’s Yoknopatawpha: The Actual and the Apocryphal. Ed. Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977. 22-39.
Padgett, John B. “MWP: William Faulkner (1897-1962).” Mississippi Writers Page. 17 Nov. 2004 <http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/faulkner_william/>.
...nment. In Stage 2, the girls realize that must put forth a great effort to adjust to the new surroundings and culture, which causes some to feel alone, uncomfortable, and even depressed. Stage 3 is when the girls start to wonder why people in this new culture live the way do and may believe that their own culture is far better than the new one. The girls become more comfortable in their new environment at last in Stage 4, as they understand it better. Finally, the girls find it simple to be able to be a part of both cultures in Stage 5. All of these stages in the story represent some of the different phases in an immigrant’s life. By writing “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, the author, Karen Russell, puts the readers in perspective of immigrants, helping them to further understand and comprehend how challenging life can be when moving to a new place.
In the passage, Indian Education we start off by following Victor who is a Indian boy from the Reservation, from first grade up to high school. Even though he is bullied in first grade, Victor finally gets payback when he gets even on Frenchy SiJohn by shoving his face in the snow and then starts punching Frenchy over and over again. Victor undergoes bad luck as the next two years he has two mean teachers in second and in third grade that do not like him very much, but luckily in fourth grade, he has a teacher named Mr. Schluter who inspires him to become a doctor so he can heal his people in the tribe. The next year life takes a turn for the worse as Victor’s cousin begins sniffing rubber cement. If it was not for his new friend Randy the
Upon analyzing his experiment, Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, concludes that people will drive to great lengths to obey orders given by a higher authority. The experiment, which included ordinary people delivering “shocks” to an unknown subject, has raised many questions in the psychological world. Diana Baumrind, a psychologist at the University of California and one of Milgram’s colleagues, attacks Milgram’s ethics after he completes his experiment in her review. She deems Milgram as being unethical towards the subjects he uses for testing and claims that his experiment is irrelevant to obedience. In contrast, Ian Parker, a writer for New Yorker and Human Sciences, asserts Milgram’s experiments hold validity in the psychological world. While Baumrind focuses on Milgram’s ethics, Parker concentrates more on the reactions, both immediate and long-term, to his experiments.
William Faulkner is widely considered to be one of the great American authors of the twentieth century. Although his greatest works are identified with a particular region and time (Mississippi in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), the themes he explores are universal. He was also an extremely accomplished writer in a technical sense. Novels such as The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! Feature bold experimentation with shifts in time and narrative. Several of his short stories are favorites of anthologists, including "A Rose for Emily." This strange story of love, obsession, and death is a favorite among both readers and critics. The narrator, speaking for the town of Jefferson in Faulkner 's fictional Yoknapatawpha
In a series of experiments conducted from 1960 to 1963, American psychologist Stanley Milgram, sought to examine the relationship between obedience and authority in order to understand how Nazi doctors were able to carry out experiments on prisoners during WWII. While there are several theories about Milgram’s results, philosopher Ruwen Ogien uses the experiment as grounds for criticizing virtue ethics as a moral theory. In chapter 9 of Human Kindness and The Smell of Warm Croissant, Ogien claims that “what determines behavior is not character but other factors tied to situation” (Ogien 120). The purpose of this essay is not to interpret the results of the Milgram experiments. Instead this essay serves to argue why I am not persuaded by Ogien’s
Faulkner, William. The Sound and The Fury: The Corrected Text with Faulkner's Appendix. Norton, 1994.
Growing up in Mississippi in the late Nineteenth Century and the early part of the Twentieth Century, young William Faulkner witnessed first hand the struggles his beloved South endured through their slow progression of rebuilding. These experiences helped to develop Faulkner’s writing style. “Faulkner deals almost exclusively with the Southern scene (with) the Civil War … always behind his work” (Warren 1310. His works however are not so much historical in nature but more like folk lore. This way Faulkner is not constrained to keep details accurate, instead he manipulate the story to share his on views leading the reader to conclude morals or lessons from his experience. Faulkner writes often and “sympathetically of the older order of the antebellum society. It was a society that valued honor, (and) was capable of heroic action” (Brooks 145) both traits Faulkner admired. These sympathetic views are revealed in the story “A Rose for Emily” with Miss Emily becoming a monument for the Antebellum South.
In this book, and others of this series, it was commonplace to find sentences that stretched on for a page in order to create mood, multiple narrators, or short stories complicated with a stream-of-consciousness blather that was hard to understand. Therefore, readers had difficulty following these novels, and Faulkner’s popularity soon dwindled, that is until Malcolm Cowley wrote The Portable Faulkner, which contained excerpts from the Yoknapatawpha series, and made Faulkner’s genius evident to his readers. Shortly thereafter, many of Faulkner’s works were reissued and he became a literary giant, and was even awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. Until death, Faulkner continued to create works of literature, including both short stories and novels.
William Faulkner was a twentieth century American author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Most famous for his novel The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner defines Southern literature. In his mythical county of Yaknapatawpha, Faulkner contrasted the past with the present era. The past was represented in Emily Grierson, Colonel Sartoris, the Board of Alderman, and the Negro servant. Homer Barron, the new Board of Alderman, and the new sheriff represented the present.
Brooks, Cleanth. "William Faulkner: Visions of Good and Evil." Faulkner, New Perspectives. Ed. Richard H. Brodhead. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Prentice-Hall, 1983.
Faulkner's great-grandfather, Colonel William C. Falkner had moved from Tennessee to the Mississippi Delta in 1841. The Colonel was a Civil War hero, plantation owner, railroad builder, and even a writer (Larinde). Faulkner's grandfather and father were both respected, though not wealthy. They were also both alcoholics.
Padgett, John B. "MWP: William Faulkner (1897-1962)." The University of Mississippi. 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 1 Apr. 2011. .
In many of Faulkner’s stories, he tells about an imaginary county in Mississippi named Yoknapatawpha. He uses this county as the setting for his story “Barn Burning” and it is also thought that the town of Jefferson from “A Rose for Emily” is located in Yoknapatawpha County. The story of a boy’s struggle between being loyal to his family or to his community makes “Barn Burning” exciting and dramatic, but a sense of awkwardness and unpleasantness arrives from the story of how the fictional town of Jefferson discovers that its long time resident, Emily Grierson, has been sleeping with the corpse of her long-dead friend with whom she has had a relationship with.
In reference to the media’s role, they have been highlighted for playing a part in maintaining these views by portraying victims in a certain way according to the newsworthiness of each story and their selectiveness (Greer, 2007). Furthermore, there has been an increase in both fictional crime programmes and crime documentaries, with Crimewatch particularly becoming a regular part of British viewing. In the modern context, crime has continued to represent a large proportion of news reporting and with the aid of social networking sites and self-publicity via the internet, journalists are now more able to dig even deeper into the lives of people on whom they wish to report. Newspapers continue to keep the public informed with the latest headlines and the internet has also provided opportunities for members of the public to have their input in blogs.
White, R., and Perrone, S. (2009) Crime, Criminality and Criminal Justice. Melbourne: Oxford University [Chapter 2 ‘Crime and the Media’]