Between Demythologization and Transcendence: Faulkner’s Poetics of Historical Trauma
DOI: https://doi.org/10.34640/univmadeiracjhs1constandache
Palavras-chave:
Faulkner, Modernism, Short prose, Literary myth, YoknapatawphaResumo
This paper offers a critical analysis of William Faulkner’s status as an unconventional novelist, examining how short prose decisively contributes to the construction of his mythopoetic universe. Building on Malcolm Cowley’s observation that Faulkner does not write traditional novels but fragments of a discontinuous macrotext, this study argues that narrative fragmentation—expressed through the rejection of linearity, the plurality of voices, and temporal distortion—constitutes the authentic mode of his literary modernism, as evidenced in ‘‘The Bear’’ and ‘‘That Evening Sun’’.
The analysis focuses on the ways in which these short stories, though formally autonomous, are later organically integrated into major novels, revealing a circular compositional strategy and Faulkner’s sustained engagement with memory and historical consciousness. Yoknapatawpha County is approached as a symbolic, mythical space where memory, trauma, and history intersect within a nonlinear, stratified temporality, linking personal experience to collective inheritance.
In contrast to Hemingway’s stylistic economy, Faulkner’s discourse is marked by density, ambiguity, and cumulative meaning, embodying two opposing paradigms of representing reality. In Faulkner’s vision, myth no longer guarantees ontological stability but becomes fluid and contested, shaped by modernity’s identity crisis, as his narratives negotiate historical trauma and its ethical implications. From this perspective, the paper reassesses Faulkner’s influence on narrative postmodernism and reconsiders short prose as the generative nucleus of a tense, original literary mythology.
Referências
Abdur-Rahman, A. I. (2019). On Faulkner, Racism, and Life in (the) Ruins. The Faulkner Journal, 33(2), 121–130.
Aiken, C. S. (2009). William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape. University of Georgia Press.
Barthes, R. (1977). Image, Music, Text. Harper Collins UK.
Bleikasten, A. (1990). The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner’s Novels from The Sound and The Fury to Light in August. Indiana University Press.
Bleikasten, A. (2017). William Faulkner: A Life Through Novels. Indiana University Press.
Bloom, H. (2008). William Faulkner. Chelsea House.
Blotner, J. (2005). Faulkner: A Biography. University Press of Mississippi.
Brooks, C. (1985). William Faulkner: First Encounters. Yale University Press.
Brooks, C. (1989). William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha County. Louisiana State University Press.
Campbell, N., Kean, A., Dix, A., & Templeton, P. (2025). American Cultural Studies: An Introduction to American Culture. Taylor & Francis.
Camus, A. (1956). La Chute. Gallimard.
Corngold, S. (2023). Expeditions to Kafka: Selected Essays. Bloomsbury Academic.
Cowley, M. (1945). William Faulkner’s Legend of the South. The Sewanee Review, 53(3), 343–61.
Dabashi, P., & White, S. G. (2022). The New William Faulkner Studies. Cambridge University Press.
Davis, T. M. (2003). The Signifying Abstraction: Reading ‘the Negro’ in Absalom, Absalom! In F. Hobson (Ed.), William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! A Casebook (pp. 69–106). Oxford Academic.
Dickinson, E. (1986). Selected Letters. Belknap Press.
Faulkner, W. (1935). As I Lay Dying. Chatto & Windus.
Faulkner, W. (1950). William Faulkner—Banquet speech. Nobel Prize Outreach (pp. 2–16).
Faulkner, W. (1956, Spring). The Art of Fiction, no. 12 [Interview by J. Stein]. The Paris Review, 28-56.
Faulkner, W. (1965). The Unvanquished. Random House.
Faulkner, W. (1975). Requiem for a Nun. Vintage Books.
Faulkner, W. (1986). Absalom, Absalom! Random House.
Faulkner, W. (1991). Go Down, Moses. Vintage Books.
Faulkner, W. (1995). The Sound and the Fury. Vintage Classics.
Faulkner, W. (2000). Light in August. Vintage Classics.
Faulkner, W. (2009). Collected Stories of William Faulkner. Vintage International.
Godden, R. (1997). Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution. Cambridge University Press.
Gorra, M. (2020). The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War. Liveright.
Hamblin, R. (2022). Critical Essays on William Faulkner. University Press of Mississippi.
Hemingway, E. (1999). Death in the Afternoon. Pocketbooks.
Honeini, A. (2019). Introduction: Faulkner, Transgressive Fiction, (Post) Modernist Literature. The Faulkner Journal, 33(1), 1–11.
Howe, I. (1991). William Faulkner: A Critical Study. Ivan R. Dee.
Malraux, A. (1965). Man’s Fate. McGraw-Hill Education.
Matthews, J. T. (2009). William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South. Wiley-Blackwell.
McKenna, A. J. (2022). Faulkner’s Novels Past and Present. Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, 29, 39–61.
Millgate, M. (1978). The Achievement of William Faulkner. University of Nebraska Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (2007). Existentialism is a Humanism (C. Macomber, Trans.). Yale University Press.
Schwartz, L. H. (1990). Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism. University of Tennessee Press.
Sciuto, J. G. (2025). Intersecting Worlds: Colonial Liminality in US Southern and Icelandic Literatures. University Press of Mississippi.
Singal, D. J. (1987). Towards a Definition of Southern Modernism. American Literary History, 39(1), 7–26.
Vickery, O. W. (1995). The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation. Louisiana State University Press.
Warren, R. P. (Ed.) (1967). Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays. Prentice-Hall.
Wright, D. T. H. (2022). Extending Modernist Stream-of-Consciousness Aesthetics: Digital Variations on William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 37(1), 280–288.
Zender, K. F. (2002). Faulkner and the Politics of Reading. Louisiana State University Press.
Downloads
Publicado
Como Citar
Edição
Secção
Licença
Direitos de Autor (c) 2026 Ioana Constandache
Este trabalho encontra-se publicado com a Licença Internacional Creative Commons Atribuição 4.0.
