Free Essay

William Faulkner's Literary Traits

In: English and Literature

Submitted By MTBlack
Words 2151
Pages 9
The Rebirth of the South: Wolfe, Faulkner, Warren

The South is more distinctively a region than any other section of the United States is, because of the experiences and traditions that have taught it attitudes sharply at variance with some of the standard American beliefs:
● The sense of failure, which comes from being the only group of Americans who have known military defeat, military occupation, and seemingly unconquerable poverty;
● The sense of guilt, which comes from having been a part of America’s classic symbol of injustice, the enslavement and then the segregation of the Negro; and
● The sense of frustration, which comes from the consistent inadequacy of the means at hand to wrestle with the problems to be faced, whether they be poverty, racial intolerance, or the preservation of an historical past rich in tradition.

In the years after the Civil War, the Southerner attempted to deny these things by the simple, but ultimately ineffectual, process of ignoring them. The Southern local colour writers concentrated on the quaint, the eccentric, and the remote; and the creators of the “plantation tradition” idealised the past.

Against this sentimental view the first two voices that were strongly raised were those of Ellen Glasgow and James Branch Cabell, Virginians who in their differing ways defined the patterns which 20th-century Southern fiction was to take when it became serious and fell into the hands of that group of writers of talent who have practised it in that century. In other words, when this group of talented young writers in the 1920’s and 30’s addressed themselves to the representation of the world through the image of their region, they followed the paths blazed by Miss Glasgow and Cabell.

These writers were not only Southern but they were also the products of the same social and cultural forces that were shaping the world of other American writers. The idealistic movement produced a host of social critics who busily protested against their world. In other movements than realism the revolt against the present and past went forward, notably in Gertrude’s Stein experiments with language and in the expatriates’ espousal of Continental art forms. In political terms, collectivist writers like John Dos Passos attacked the capitalist system under which they had grown up and which suddenly seemed to fail them. All these writers measured the present against the American dream and found it lacking, and they relentlessly pointed out to their fellow citizens the flaws they found.

The Southern writers responded to these same impulses. But when the Southern revolt against the American present was uttered, it was a call to an agrarian order. True to his traditions, the Middle Western writer called for social reform and pled for a utopia of the future, but his Southern cousin, bound by the past, looked backward for his answers.

The Southern writers sought to revitalize for the modern world a view of man that the South had held since Thomas Jefferson. This view saw man as best in his relation to the soil (particularly as that relationship existed in the pre-Civil War South). Southern writers generally used this myth of a good order in the past as a weapon of attack against the bad order of modern industrialism.

In the case of Faulkner, even though the historical concept is almost infinitely complex, it can be reduced in this way: The South once knew an order and a tradition based on honour and personal integrity, but it was guilty of the exploitation of fellow human beings, the Indians and the Negroes. Because of this great guilt, came the Civil War like a flaming sword and ended the paradise of the noble, but guilty past. After the War, noble men for ignoble reasons submitted themselves to the moral duplicity and the mechanical inefficiency of the mindless new world, and the region fell into the darkness of moral decay. If it is to win its way out again, it will do it through the reawakening moral vision of its youth and the prevailing strength of its Negroes.

Finally, in dramatising a tragic view of man caught in his nature and the trap of Time, Southern novelists have returned to a vision of human experience that is sharply at variance with that vision to America, to a vision that is essentially romantic and idealistic. The Southern novelist sees man as a tragic figure rather than a mechanical victim and relates his meaning to a large structure of event and history. Wolfe, Faulkner and Warren each has created a kind of fiction out of the materials of his region and its past which can and does counterpoise the despairing view of man that naturalism and realism have taken in our time. In expressing their revolt against the modern world they have looked backward to a tradition and an order wherein meaning is to be sought and found, man has dignity, and history is a record of a purpose.

Literary Traits of Faulkner’s Works

Faulkner’s novels are generally laid in rural settings, but the problems they treat are psychological and moral rather than physical. His great subject on the surface is the decline of the South: its economic sterility, its moral disintegration, and its struggle to resist the progressive and materialistic civilization of the North.

The protagonists of his novels are:
● The decayed aristocrats: They are the old Southern families, past the peak of their prosperity and riddled with moral decay, yet still finer than their antagonists.
● The efficient, materialistic carpetbaggers, merchants, and entrepreneurs: They are gradually superseding the aristocrats.
● The Negroes: They are often more heroic and admired than the previous ones.

THEMES: Faulkner wrote during four decades in which America changed a great deal, as it endured the aftermath of World War I, Prohibition, the Jazz Age, the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. Naturally, he examined themes that have concerned many serious writers:

● Cultural conflict and change, as well as Generational Gap (A Rose for Emily)
● Tragic individualism (A Rose for Emily, Dry September)
● The weight of the past (Soldier’s pay, That Evening Sun, Red Leaves, There was a Queen, Sartoris/Flags in the Dust)
○ Hatred due to the aftermath of the civil war
○ Hatred between blacks and whites, indians and blacks, whites and indians.
● The power (and comedy) of sex (A Rose for Emily, Dry September, Sanctuary)
● The white goddess (Dry September)
● Conflict between conscience and duty to family (Absalom, Absalom! Burning Barn, Lo!)
○ Clan loyalty and its betrayal
● The corruptibility of the innocent in war (Soldier’s pay, Two soldiers)

Time is an entity in Faulkner’s world. The past exists so compellingly in the present for his characters that it sometimes seems that only the past really exists for them. Southerners used to believe that former times had been times of grandeur and longed to get back to the former glory; they despised war for taking it from them. However, they acknowledged it was a guilty past for they used to enslave human beings and realized the only past to follow was through the youth and the strength of its Negroes.

There is little political content in Faulkner’s work. He shows little interest in humanitarianism or socialistic planning, especially in his earlier works, and has even been wrongly accused of condescension toward Negroes. His approach to the Negro problem is purely aesthetic, psychological and physiological. It should not be imagined that because he uses the word nigger and sometimes shows Negroes as lazy and incompetent like other people he is a white supremacist.

Faulkner, like Hemingway, is greatly concerned with erotic passions, with cruelty, and with the connection between the two. He does not relate these horrors for mere shock effect; he is interested in aberration as a symbol of Southern decline, and as such treats it with the superb objectivity of a true artist.

STYLE: During his all writing years, the author used various writing styles. The narrative varies from the traditional storytelling of Light in August and a series of vignette-like snapshots in As I Lay Dying to the collage of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom, which is often considered Faulkner's masterpiece. Where Faulkner’s style is most difficult and the narrative line most complex, he demands the active participation of the reader in the creative process.

This complex style may be regarded as consistent with his difficult objective: to keep in focus the immediate character - “the human heart in conflict” while evoking the past, which is always present with us.

Because his novels treat the decay and anguish of the South following the Civil War, they are rich in violent and sordid events. But they are grounded in a profound and compassionate humanism that celebrates the tragedy, energy, and humor of ordinary human life.

DEVICES: In Literature, “symbolism” may refer to the use of abstract concepts, as a way to obfuscate any literal interpretation, or to allow for the broader applicability of the prose to meanings beyond what may be literally described. William Faulkner used symbolism extensively, to represent themes which applied to greater contexts in his contemporary politics and society. He uses synaesthesia widely in an attempt to describe the indescribable.

He employed images and symbols drawn from many sources particularly from Freud, to strengthen and enrich his meanings event to the extent in The Sound and the Fury, it has been suggested, of making the three leading characters into personifications of the id, the ego, and the super ego.

His style observes the conventions of a new prose intending to engage the imaginative participation of the reader and to provide a language more subjective and flexible than ordinary prose. This rhetorical convention - the dislocation of logical construction in the free associations of images - facilitated Faulkner’s psychological approach, the projection of events through the memory of consciousness of the character in the form of “interior monologue”. Like, Wolfe, another representative of the Rebirth of the South, Faulkner often explored the inner self, particularly in the Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. But in the lonely selves of his characters are no satisfactory answers; for such answers we must see the characters against the larger context of the history of Faulkner’s imaginary country.

Faulkner always used a double frame of reference in his fiction, although with considerable subtlety. First it is the Bible itself, as casual references to scriptures are meaningful to the people in his stories. Echoes of the Christ narrative appear in The Light in August where the protagonist, Joe Christmas, believes he has a trace of Negro blood, a symbol of guilt, which he must expiate, and Faulkner bolsters this suggestion with a long chain of parallels between Joe’s actions and those of the Passion week. The second frame is the classical inheritance of the South, especially the sense of Greek tragedy. Like Aeschylus in the ancient drama, Faulkner creates in Absalom, Absalom! the sense of doom that permeates his other novels: “This whole land, the whole South is cursed and all of us who derive from it, [...] white and black both, lie under the curse”. In the South God’s curse on man is dramatized in the institution of slavery. Sutpen adopts the system and is in one sense the instigator of the ‘current of retribution and fatality’ but also ‘the brute instrument of that justice which presides over human events’, that is, like Agamemnon, he is guilty of committing sins himself, but he is also a subject to a curse he cannot escape and is even being used as tool for a supreme power in the machinery of that curse.

Other Faulknerian habits of presentation that show consistency throughout his career include his propensity for ambiguous and disconcerting openings. In many of his works, instead of beginning with a traditional introduction, Faulkner confronts the reader with a confusing preview of the fictional world he is about to enter. From the moment he started writing fiction, Faulkner habitually seemed to have made a point to disturbing the reader. In fact, the most confusing pages in his novels commonly fall within the first few pages.

He has a strategy known as “empty center” in which a character emerges as an elusive figure, a subjective creature of fantasy and memory. It doesn’t function as a fully realized character but as a locus of unfulfilled desire and loss around which everything in the novel revolves.

As regards Faulkner’s endings, a number of his novels close with traditional statements which bring the elements from various earlier parts of the text into some kind of final alignment, allowing us to preceding details. There are, however, a number of Faulkner’s novels that display a rather different closure strategy, that end more by rhetorical force than by achieving any kind of narrative equilibrium. Faulkner would combine climatic rhetorical structures, terminal allusions, and universally resonant images, usually derived from nature, religion, the arts or myth.

Similar Documents

Premium Essay

Deat and Transfiguration

...ANALYZING NOVELS & SHORT STORy  Good feedback is kind, thorough and timely. It’s professional and focused. It leaves the writer feeling challenged to do better but great about their strengths. Even if that just means the location they chose was cool. Give your feedback relative to the skill set of the writer. Never lie or obfuscate. Just serve it up gently. An upset writer isn’t going to hear your points anyway. But an encouraged one will. Trust me on this. — Julie Gray PRINTER FRIENDLY PAGE  Literary analysis looks critically at a work of fiction in order to understand how the parts contribute to the whole. When analyzing a novel or short story, you’ll need to consider elements such as the context, setting, characters, plot, literary devices, and themes. Remember that a literary analysis isn’t merely a summary or review, but rather an interpretation of the work and an argument about it based on the text. Depending on your assignment, you might argue about the work’s meaning or why it causes certain reader reactions. This handout will help you analyze a short story or novel—use it to form a thesis, or argument, for your essay. Summary Begin by summarizing the basic plot: “Matilda by Roald Dahl is about a gifted little girl in small town America who learns to make things move with her mind and saves her teacher and school from the evil principal.” This will help ground you in the story. (When you write your paper, you probably won’t include a summary because your readers...

Words: 1862 - Pages: 8

Free Essay

Tragic Heroes

...Research Paper Miss Emily Grierson and Eveline The family and society’s expectation of a woman has led to some women becoming tragic heroes and anti-heroes who battled consistently with their true identity. Literary works of William Faulkner in the short story, "A Rose for Emily", and James Joyce’s "Eveline", reflects the negative impact of these expectations. Based on information, culled from Dr David Smith’s notes, tragic heroes are driven and obsessed with past deeds or by fate, they are neither entirely good nor entirely bad and are fated to cause grief to individuals or to the community, they are often leaders in the community or head of family (2). Faulkner shows these common traits of tragic hero in Miss Emily Grierson; a protagonist in self-exile from the modern world, locked away in her decaying mansion (3). In James Joyce’s Eveline, a protagonist is revealed as tragic hero who endures a dramatic and tragic life full of conflicts, but Smith thinks otherwise, he refers to her as an anti-hero and is of the opinion that antihero should not be confused with tragic hero because, “existentialist believed modern life does not allow the existence of a true hero. Modern life dehumanizes everyone”(3), short of this, Eveline is a classic example of a tragic hero. William Faulkner’s Miss Emily and James Joyce’s Eveline are women who in the quest of fulfilling the roles assigned to them by their family, lover, and society, cost them happiness and freedom. Faulkner in his short story...

Words: 2596 - Pages: 11

Free Essay

Literature

...Beso, Luiz Miguel B. BSE EN 2-1 Literature Students are asked to write literary analysis essays because this type of assignment encourages you to think about how and why a poem, short story, novel, or play was written. To successfully analyze literature, you’ll need to remember that authors make specific choices for particular reasons. Your essay should point out the author’s choices and attempt to explain their significance. Another way to look at a literary analysis is to consider a piece of literature from your own perspective. Rather than thinking about the author’s intentions, you can develop an argument based on any single term (or combination of terms) listed below. You’ll just need to use the original text to defend and explain your argument to the reader. Allegory - narrative form in which the characters are representative of some larger humanistic trait (i.e. greed, vanity, or bravery) and attempt to convey some larger lesson or meaning to life. Although allegory was originally and traditionally character based, modern allegories tend to parallel story and theme. William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily- the decline of the Old South Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde- man’s struggle to contain his inner primal instincts District 9- South African Apartheid X Men- the evils of prejudice Harry Potter- the dangers of seeking “racial purity” Character - representation of a person, place, or thing performing traditionally human activities...

Words: 2273 - Pages: 10

Free Essay

English Literature

...1. Literature of the 17th century. John Milton. “Paradise Lost”. John Bunyan. “Pilgrim’s Progress”. The peculiarities of the English literature of the 17th century are determined by the events of the Engl. Bourgeois Revolution, which took place in 1640-60. King Charles I was beheaded in 1649& General Oliver Cromwell became the leader of the new government. In 1660, shortly after Cro-ll’s death, the dynasty of the Stuarts was restored. The establishment of new social&eco-ic relations, the change from feudal to bourgeois ownership, escalating class-struggle, liberation movement and contradictions of the bourgeois society found their reflection in lit-re. The main representatives of this period is: John Milton: was born in London&educated at Christ’s College. He lived a pure life believing that he had a great purpose to complete. At college he was known as the The Lady of Christ’s. he Got master’s degree at Cambridge. It’s convenient to consider his works in 3 divisions. At first he wrote his short poems at Horton. (The Passion, Song on May Morning, L’Allegro). Then he wrote mainly prose. His 3 greatest poems belong to his last group. At the age of 23 he had still done little in life&he admits this in one of his sonnets. (On his 23d B-day) In his another sonnet he wrote on his own blindness. (On his Blindness) Milton wrote diff. kinds of works. His prose works were mainly concerned with church, affairs, divorce & freedom. The English civil war between Charles...

Words: 10397 - Pages: 42

Premium Essay

Narrative

...Narrative A narrative is a sequence of events that a narrator tells in story form. A narrator is a storyteller of any kind, whether the authorial voice in a novel or a friend telling you about last night’s party. Point of View The point of view is the perspective that a narrative takes toward the events it describes. First-person narration: A narrative in which the narrator tells the story from his/her own point of view and refers to him/herself as “I.” The narrator may be an active participant in the story or just an observer. When the point of view represented is specifically the author’s, and not a fictional narrator’s, the story is autobiographical and may be nonfictional (see Common Literary Forms and Genres below). Third-person narration: The narrator remains outside the story and describes the characters in the story using proper names and the third-person pronouns “he,” “she,” “it,” and “they.” • Omniscient narration: The narrator knows all of the actions, feelings, and motivations of all of the characters. For example, the narrator of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina seems to know everything about all the characters and events in the story. • Limited omniscient narration: The narrator knows the actions, feelings, and motivations of only one or a handful of characters. For example, the narrator of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has full knowledge of only Alice. • Free indirect discourse: The narrator conveys a character’s inner thoughts...

Words: 12257 - Pages: 50

Free Essay

North American Fiction

...when a piece is written in North America, more precisely in the USA, it would automatically be given this epithet. But it should be taken into account that this idea is quite broad and doesn’t reflect the real essence of the term. However, there is also another definition that gathers this essence: American Literature is the one that represents the Americanism, the singularity of the USA philosophy and culture. This way, instead of focusing on who the author is, it is focused on the content of the writing. In that which concerns Fiction, the following documents are the ones considered as narrative: Speeches Letters Short Stories Essays Political Documents Sermons Novels Diaries 1 FIRST LITERARY EXPRESSIONS The first documents in which the idea of Americanism is very present are the Sermons. They respond to the strict Protestantism settled in the New Continent after the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers and Puritans in the Mayflower (1620) and the Arabella (1630). They established a theocratic community whose main and only point of reference was the Bible. That is why the idea of the ‘city upon a hill’ is still very present in American mentality. As we all know, their community was also governed by the concept of Predestination. This belief was based in the idea that we are saved or condemned since the very moment we are born or even, since the very moment when the Universe was created. Therefore...

Words: 12691 - Pages: 51

Premium Essay

100 Años de Soledad

...irony underlying the remarkably energetic and entertaining inventiveness in the plot and the characters. Thirdly, by way of accounting, at least in part, for these complex effects, I wish to look at two particular aspects: the double sense of time in the novel and the style of magical realism. Finally, putting all these elements together, I shall address the question posed at the start. I would like to suggest that this novel does, in fact, have something very insightful and important to reveal about the social and political realities of the world it depicts and that this theme may be difficult for North Americans fully to recognize. One Hundred Years of Solitude as an Epic It seems clear to me that, in any conventional sense of the literary term, we are dealing here with an epic work: a long narrative fiction with a huge scope which holds up for our inspection a particular cultural moment in the history of a people. The novel is the history of the founding, development, and death of a human settlement, Macondo, and of the most important family in that town, the Buendias. In following the historical narrative of...

Words: 6156 - Pages: 25

Premium Essay

The Rise of the Tale

...be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Killick, Tim British short fiction in the early nineteenth century : the rise of the tale 1. Short stories, English – History and criticism 2. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism 3. Short story 4. Literary form – History – 19th century I. Title 823’.0109 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Killick, Tim. British short fiction in the early nineteenth century : the rise of the tale / by Tim Killick. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6413-0 (alk. paper) 1. Short stories, English—History and criticism. 2. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Short story. 4. Literary form—History—19th century. I. Title. PR829.K56 2008 823’.0109--dc22 2007052226 ISBN: 978-0-7546-6413-0 Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1 Overview: Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century Part I: Criticism, History, and Definitions Part II: Short Fiction in the Periodical Press 5 5 22 2...

Words: 98420 - Pages: 394

Premium Essay

British Short Fictions

...be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Killick, Tim British short fiction in the early nineteenth century : the rise of the tale 1. Short stories, English – History and criticism 2. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism 3. Short story 4. Literary form – History – 19th century I. Title 823’.0109 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Killick, Tim. British short fiction in the early nineteenth century : the rise of the tale / by Tim Killick. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6413-0 (alk. paper) 1. Short stories, English—History and criticism. 2. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Short story. 4. Literary form—History—19th century. I. Title. PR829.K56 2008 823’.0109--dc22 2007052226 ISBN: 978-0-7546-6413-0 Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1 Overview: Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century Part I: Criticism, History, and Definitions Part II: Short Fiction in the Periodical Press 5 5 22 2...

Words: 98420 - Pages: 394

Premium Essay

Marxist

...be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Killick, Tim British short fiction in the early nineteenth century : the rise of the tale 1. Short stories, English – History and criticism 2. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism 3. Short story 4. Literary form – History – 19th century I. Title 823’.0109 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Killick, Tim. British short fiction in the early nineteenth century : the rise of the tale / by Tim Killick. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6413-0 (alk. paper) 1. Short stories, English—History and criticism. 2. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Short story. 4. Literary form—History—19th century. I. Title. PR829.K56 2008 823’.0109--dc22 2007052226 ISBN: 978-0-7546-6413-0 Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1 Overview: Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century Part I: Criticism, History, and Definitions Part II: Short Fiction in the Periodical Press 5 5 22 2...

Words: 98420 - Pages: 394

Premium Essay

Reading a Novel in 1950-2000

...Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000 i RTNA01 1 13/6/05, 5:28 PM READING THE NOVEL General Editor: Daniel R. Schwarz The aim of this series is to provide practical introductions to reading the novel in both the British and Irish, and the American traditions. Published Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel 1890–1930 Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000 Daniel R. Schwarz Brian W. Shaffer Forthcoming Reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel Paula R. Backscheider Reading the Nineteenth-Century Novel Harry E. Shaw and Alison Case Reading the American Novel 1780–1865 Shirley Samuels Reading the American Novel 1865–1914 G. R. Thompson Reading the Twentieth-Century American Novel James Phelan ii RTNA01 2 13/6/05, 5:28 PM Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000 Brian W. Shaffer iii RTNA01 3 13/6/05, 5:28 PM © 2006 by Brian W. Shaffer BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Brian W. Shaffer to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and...

Words: 123617 - Pages: 495

Premium Essay

Literatura Proizvedeniia

...1. W. Shakespeare « Hamlet» (Renaissance) Character List Hamlet -  The Prince of Denmark, the title character, and the protagonist. About thirty years old at the start of the play, Hamlet is the son of Queen Gertrude and the late King Hamlet, and the nephew of the present king, Claudius. Hamlet is melancholy, bitter, and cynical, full of hatred for his uncle’s scheming and disgust for his mother’s sexuality. A reflective and thoughtful young man who has studied at the University of Wittenberg, Hamlet is often indecisive and hesitant, but at other times prone to rash and impulsive acts. Hamlet is extremely philosophical and contemplative. He is particularly drawn to difficult questions or questions that cannot be answered with any certainty. Faced with evidence that his uncle murdered his father, evidence that any other character in a play would believe, Hamlet becomes obsessed with proving his uncle’s guilt before trying to act. Claudius -  The King of Denmark, Hamlet’s uncle, and the play’s antagonist. The villain of the play, Claudius is a calculating, ambitious politician, driven by his sexual appetites and his lust for power, but he occasionally shows signs of guilt and human feeling—his love for Gertrude, for instance, seems sincere. Gertrude -  The Queen of Denmark, Hamlet’s mother, recently married to Claudius. Gertrude loves Hamlet deeply, but she is a shallow, weak woman who seeks affection and status more urgently than moral rectitude or truth. Polonius -  The...

Words: 9533 - Pages: 39

Premium Essay

Cyrus the Great

...critical theory today critical theory today A Us e r - F r i e n d l y G u i d e S E C O N D E D I T I O N L O I S T Y S O N New York London Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN © 2006 by Lois Tyson Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number‑10: 0‑415‑97410‑0 (Softcover) 0‑415‑97409‑7 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑415‑97410‑3 (Softcover) 978‑0‑415‑97409‑7 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data Tyson, Lois, 1950‑ Critical theory today : a user‑friendly guide / Lois Tyson.‑‑ 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0‑415‑97409‑7 (hb) ‑‑ ISBN 0‑415‑97410‑0 (pb) 1. Criticism...

Words: 221284 - Pages: 886

Free Essay

Thesis- the Gift of the Magi

...The Gift of the Magi Themes Love "Gift of the Magi" is the story of a poor, young couple whose love for each other is the most important thing in their lives. Such is their love that they're led to sacrifice their most valuable possessions to find Christmas gifts for each other. The warm home they make together contrasts with the drabness of their poverty and the dreary world outside. Their love seems to know no bounds, though Della (the wife) worries about how her sacrifice will affect her husband because of how it affects her looks. If ever there were a story with the message that all you need to be happy is love, this is it. Sacrifice The two main characters in "Gift of the Magi" are a husband and wife who give up their most precious possessions to be able to afford gifts for each other on Christmas Eve. The story seems to be all about sacrifice. We watch Della go through the process of deciding to make the sacrifice and going through with it, only to discover that her husband has made the same sacrifice. The story's narrator assures us that in their willingness to give up all they have, they have proven themselves the wisest of all gift-givers. It might remain unclear, though, exactly what their sacrifice has accomplished, or how it has affected them. Wealth In many ways, "Gift of the Magi" is a story about what it means for something to be valuable. Does something's value lie in how much money it is worth? Or are other things more valuable than money? The main characters...

Words: 10606 - Pages: 43

Premium Essay

Learning Theory

...Beginning theory An introduction to literary and cultural theory Second edition Peter Barry © Peter Barry 1995, 2002 ISBN: 0719062683 Contents Acknowledgements - page x Preface to the second edition - xii Introduction - 1 About this book - 1 Approaching theory - 6 Slop and think: reviewing your study of literature to date - 8 My own 'stock-taking' - 9 1 Theory before 'theory' - liberal humanism - 11 The history of English studies - 11 Stop and think - 11 Ten tenets of liberal humanism - 16 Literary theorising from Aristotle to Leavis some key moments - 21 Liberal humanism in practice - 31 The transition to 'theory' - 32 Some recurrent ideas in critical theory - 34 Selected reading - 36 2 Structuralism - 39 Structuralist chickens and liberal humanist eggs Signs of the fathers - Saussure - 41 Stop and think - 45 The scope of structuralism - 46 What structuralist critics do - 49 Structuralist criticism: examples - 50 Stop and think - 53 Stop and think - 55 39 Stop and think - 57 Selected reading - 60 3 Post-structuralism and deconstruction - 61 Some theoretical differences between structuralism and post-structuralism - 61 Post-structuralism - life on a decentred planet - 65 Stop and think - 68 Structuralism and post-structuralism - some practical differences - 70 What post-structuralist critics do - 73 Deconstruction: an example - 73 Selected reading - 79 4 Postmodernism - 81 What is postmodernism? What was modernism? -...

Words: 98252 - Pages: 394