桔子分期黑户能做吗:威廉．福克纳的创作与宗教文化

William Faulkner (1897-1962)
William Faulkner ranks with Ernest Hemingway as one of the leading American authors of the twentieth century. Faulkner, like Robert Frost, was a regionalist. His region was the Deep South, with its bitter history of slavery, civil war and destruction.

a.His Life

a. His Major Works
Faulkner wrote 19 novels, 4 collections of short stories, and 2 volumes of poetry. Among them, four novels are masterpieces by any standards:
The Sound and the Fury
It describes the decay and downfall of an old Southern aristocratic family, symbolizing the old social order, told from four different points of view.
Light in August
Absalom, Absalom!
One important theme of the novel is doom brought about by the denial of humanity.
Go Down, Moses
It tells roughly the same story of moral injustice which, in Faulkner's opinion, poisoned southern civilization at the root.

b. Major Themes
Faulkner's frequent themes were history and race. He sought to explain the present time by examining the past, particularly by telling the story of several generations of one family as history altered their lives. He was deeply interested in the relationship between blacks and whites in the South, where both races exist side by side in almost equal numbers. He was especially concerned about the social problems of people who were of mixed race, unacceptable to either blacks or whites.

c. Style
His works are distinguished by complex plots, sometimes extending over several novels in which the same characters appear . The hero of one story may appear as a minor character in another. He successfully advanced two modern literary techniques: stream of consciousness and multiple points of view.
1)Stream-of-consciousness
It is first used by James Joyce in 1922.That is, to tell a story by recording the thoughts of one character. Action and plot are less important than the reactions and inner musings of the narrator. Time sequences are often dislocated. The reader feels himself to be a participant in the story, rather than an observer, and a high degree of emotion can be achieved by this technique. In The Sound and the Fury , the whole story was told through the thoughts of one character.

2) Multiple Points of View
Faulkner was a master at presenting multiple points of view, showing within the same story how the characters reacted differently to the same person or the same situation. The use of the technique gives the story a circular form- wherein one event is the center, with various points of view radiating from it - rather than a linear structure, with one event following another by cause and effect, in logical progression of time.
Brief introduction to the speaker:
William Faulkner (1897-1962) The novels of William Faulkner rank among the most important books of the 20th century. For them Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Nobel prize in Literature. Faulkner wrote mostly about his hometown of Oxford, in Lafayette County. Miss.. After two apprentice novels, Faulkner wrote six of his best books between 1929 and 1932, among them are The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Sanctuary.
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I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work, a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit. Not for glory and least of all, for profit, but to create out of the material of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It would not

be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it, commensurate for the purpose and significance of its origin. But I wou1d 1ike to do the same with the acclaim too by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and woman, already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will someday stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physica1 fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it There're no longer problems of the spirit, there's only the question; "When will I be blown up?". Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself, which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again, he must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid, and teaching himself that, forget it forever leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart. The old universal truths, lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed: love and honor and pity and pride, and compassion and sacrifice.

Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love, but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope, and most of all, without pity or compassion. His grief weaves on no universal bone, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart, but of the glands. Until he re1earns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of mall. I dec1ine to accept the end of man. It's easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure, that from the last. ding-dong of doom and clang had faded from the last worthless rock hanging tireless in the last red and dying evening, that even then, there will be one more sound, that of his puny and inexhaustible voice still talking. I refuse to accept this, I believe that man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, and sacrifice, and endurance. The poets, the writers' duty is to write about these things, it's his privilege to help man endure, lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage, and honor and hope and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poets' voice need not merely be the recall of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.