WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-1962)
"I'd want to come back a buzzard.
Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him.
He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything."
William Faulkner
Chronicler of the
American South, William Faulkner's inventive imagination and and innovative use
of language brought him an international reputation and influenced writers in
Europe, Latin America, and China. His account of the historical change between
the Old and the New South transcends regional issues or the mythical community
of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, where most of his work is
situated. Faulkner writes about broader themes: the clash of generations and
ways of life, racial and family tragedies, and, in almost archetypal terms, the
opposition of good and evil, Adapting James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness
technique, he lets his characters reveal themselves in brilliantly
extended narrative sentences that have become famous as
“Faulknerian" style; and his fantastic, sometimes allegorical, depictions
of events anitcipate "magical realist" fiction. With Faulkner's
novels, the nineteenth-century Balzacian tradition of the human comedy--the
novel as a panorama of society--acquires a new vocabulary and a renewed place
in literary history.
Questions
William Faulkner: Big Woods; The Sound and the Fury; Absalom, Absalom; Light in August
