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A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, in this reconsideration of Faulkner's life and legacy. William Faulkner, one of America’s most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance—his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South—demanding that we reevaluate the Nobel laureate’s life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon. Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words argues that even despite these contradictions—and perhaps because of them—William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner’s biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was “the South’s curse and its separate destiny,” a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South’s revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a “Lost Cause” romanticism not only defined Faulkner’s twentieth century but now even our own age. Through Gorra’s critical lens, Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America’s history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, “was” and “again.” Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that “the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning.” Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra’s travels through the South—including Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi—and commentaries on Faulkner’s fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Sally Wolff and Floyd C. Watkins, both of Emory University, took students of southern literature to Lafayette County, Mississippi, to explore the region where William Faulkner lived. They visited Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi; trekked around the countryside; and met people who were the prototypes for some of his characters. During these excursions, they discovered firsthand how profoundly Faulkner’s family, community, and region imprinted themselves on his imagination and then both shaped and enriched his work. Their primary guide was Jimmy Faulkner, who was once described by his famous uncle as “the only person who likes me for what I am.” Like his uncle, Jimmy is a born storyteller, and his recollections provide profound as well as intimate details about Faulkner as author, father, member of the unusual Faulkner clan, and resident of the model for what may be the most famous county in American literature. In these interviews, and in the forty-three splendid black-and-white photographs that accompany them, we move through Faulkner’s home territory and encounter the sources of his sense of place and its past: antebellum Rowan Oak, with its scuppernong vines and outside kitchen; old plantation homes and dogtrot houses; narrow one-lane bridges and creeks with Indian names; country churches and cemeteries. Jimmy’s comments often link specific sites with particular episodes or settings in Faulkner’s works, and his humorous stories sometimes mingle fact with fiction. Two colorful local personalities who knew Faulkner—Pearle Galloway, proprietor of a general store near Oxford for over thirty years, and Motee Daniel, owner of various enterprises, including a roadhouse, a general store, and a bootlegging operation—also tell tales about him. Galloway and Daniel provide, in turn, fascinating glimpses of the kind of people who intrigued Faulkner and about whom he wrote. While his work was most certainly influenced by his surroundings, Faulkner, through his stories and novels, likewise transformed the memories, perceptions, and interpretations of his family, his community, and his readers. Talking About William Faulkner deepens our knowledge of Faulkner’s everyday life and our understanding of the world in which he lived and of which he wrote.
Isaac McCaslin is obsessed with hunting down Old Ben, a mythical bear that wreaks havoc on the forest. After this feat is accomplished, Isaac struggles with his relationship to nature and to the land, which is complicated when he inherits a large plantation in Yoknapatawapha County. “The Bear” is included in William Faulkner’s novel, Go Down, Moses. Although primarily known for his novels, Faulkner wrote in a variety of formats, including plays, poetry, essays, screenplays, and short stories, many of which are highly acclaimed and anthologized. Like his novels, many of Faulkner’s short stories are set in fictional Yoknapatawapha County, a setting inspired by Lafayette County, where Faulkner spent most of his life. His first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includes many of his most frequently anthologized stories, including "A Rose for Emily", "Red Leaves" and "That Evening Sun." HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.
Francisco grew up at McCarroll Place, his familyb2ss ancestral home in Holly Springs, Mississippi, thirty miles north of Oxford. In the conversations with Wolff, he recalls that as a boy he would sit and listen as his father and Faulkner sat on the gallery and talked about whatever came to mind. Francisco frequently told stories to Faulkner, many of them oft-repeated, about his family and community, which dated to antebellum times. Some of these stories, Wolff shows, found their way into Faulknerb2ss fiction. Faulkner also displayed an absorbing interest in a seven-volume diary kept by Dr. Franciscob2ss great-great-grandfather Francis Terry Leak, who owned extensive plantation lands in northern Mississippi before the Civil War. Some parts of the diary recount incidents in Leakb2ss life, but most of the diary concerns business transactions, including the buying and selling of slaves and the building of a plantation home.
William Faulkner recognized voice as one of the most distinctive and powerful elements in fiction when he delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, describing the last sound at the end of the world as man's "puny inexhaustible voice, still talking." As a testimonial of an artist's faith in his art, the speech raised the value of voice to its highest reach for man, as "one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." In Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice, Stephen Ross explores the nature of voice in William Faulkner's fiction by examining the various modes of speech and writing that his texts employ. Beginning with the proposition that voice is deeply involved in the experience of reading Faulkner, Ross uses theoretically grounded notions of voice to propose new ways of explaining how Faulkner's novels and stories express meaning, showing how Faulkner used the affective power of voice to induce the reader to forget the silent and originless nature of written fiction. Ross departs from previous Faulkner criticism by proceeding not text-by-text or chronologically but by construction a workable taxonomy which defines the types of voice in Faulkner's fiction: phenomenal voice, a depicted event or object within the represented fictional world; mimetic voice, the illusion that a person is speaking; psychic voice, one heard only in the mind and overheard only through fiction's omniscience; and oratorical voice, an overtly intertextual voice which derives from a discursive practice--Southern oratory--recognizable outside the boundaries of any Faulkner text and identifiable as part of Faulkner's biographical and regional heritage. In Faulkner's own experience, listening was important. As he once confided to Malcolm Cowley, "I listen to the voices, and when I put down what the voices say, it's right." In Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice, Ross conducts a careful analysis of this fundamental source of power in Faulkner's fiction, concluding that the preponderance of voice imagery, represented talking, verbalized thought, and oratorical rhetoric and posturing makes the novels and stories fundamentally vocal. They derive their energy from the play of voices on the imaginative field of written language.
Quentin Compson narrates the story of his family’s African-American washerwoman, Nancy, who fears that her husband will murder her because she is pregnant with a white-man’s child. The events in the story are witnessed by a young Quentin and his two siblings, Caddy and Jason, who do not fully understand the adult world of race and class conflict that they are privy to. Although primarily known for his novels, William Faulkner wrote in a variety of formats, including plays, poetry, essays, screenplays, and short stories, many of which are highly acclaimed and anthologized. Like his novels, many of Faulkner’s short stories are set in fictional Yoknapatawapha County, a setting inspired by Lafayette County, where Faulkner spent most of his life. His first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includes many of his most frequently anthologized stories, including "A Rose for Emily", "Red Leaves" and "That Evening Sun." HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.
Illustrates how Faulkner and Hemingway's artistic paths and performed masculinities clashed as the authors measured themselves against each other and engendered a mutual psychological influence.
Set in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, As I Lay Dying tells the story of the dysfunctional Bundren family as they set out to fulfill Addie Bundren’s dying wish. Told by fifteen narrators, including Jewel, Cash, Darl and Dewey Dell, As I Lay Dying uses stream of consciousness to unveil each character’s motivations for carrying out Addie’s wish, along with a multitude of lies they have been hiding from each other. As I Lay Dying was Faulkner’s fifth novel and is included in the Modern Library’s list of 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel inspired a number of critically-acclaimed books including Graham Swift’s Last Orders and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body: A Novel. The title, which inspired the name of the Grammy-nominated band As I Lay Dying, is derived from Homer’s The Odyssey. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
Hailed by critics and scholars as the most valuable study of Faulkner's fiction, Cleanth Brooks's William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country explores the Mississippi writer's fictional county and the commanding role it played in so much of his work. Brooks shows that Faulkner's strong attachment to his region, with its rich particularity and deep sense of community, gave him a special vantage point from which to view the modern world.Books's consideration of such novels as Light in August, The Unvanquished, As I Lay Dying, and Intruder in the Dust shows the ways in which Faulkner used Yoknapatawpha County to examine the characteristic themes of the twentieth century. Contending that a complete understanding of Faulkner's writing cannot be had without a thorough grasp of fictional detail, Brooks gives careful attention to "what happens: In the Yoknapatawpha novels. He also includes useful genealogies of Faulkner's fictional clans and a character index.
William Faulkner (1897–1962) once said of his novels and stories, “I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world.” This biography provides an overview of the life and career of the famous author, demonstrating the interrelationships of that life, centered in Oxford, Mississippi, with the characters and events of his fictional world. The book begins with a chapter on Faulkner's most famous ancestor, W. C. Falkner, “the Old Colonel,” who greatly influenced both the content and the form of Faulkner's fiction. Robert W. Hamblin then proceeds to examine the highlights of Faulkner's biography, from his childhood to his youthful days as a fledgling poet, through his time in New Orleans, the creation of Yoknapatawpha, the years of struggle and his season of prolific genius, and through his time in Hollywood and his winning of the Nobel Prize. The book concludes with a description of his last years as a revered author, cultural ambassador, and university writer-in-residence. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Faulkner spoke of “the agony and sweat of the human spirit” that goes into artistic creation. For Faulkner, that struggle was especially acute. Poor and neglected for much of his life, suffering from chronic depression and alcoholism, and unhappy in his personal life, Faulkner overcame tremendous obstacles to achieve literary success. One of the major themes of his novels and stories remains endurance, and his biography exhibits that quality in abundance. Faulkner the man endured and ultimately prevailed.