Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis is about the Southern plantation in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha fiction: how \nit is represented and constructed, how it is narratively articulated and experienced as \nboth space and symbol. But as its full title suggests, Building Yoknapatawpha is equally \nabout narrative structures and spaces too: about how Yoknapatawpha textually fits \ntogether; about how this spreading oeuvre was constructed by Faulkner and how it \nmay equally be reconstructed by the reader. It is about both the reading of space and \nthe space of reading – about how the architectural spaces and social order of the \nSouthern plantation and the narrative structures of the novel inform, complement, \nand challenge one another, and how their affinity may ultimately be used to generate \na new “spatialized” model of literary reading. \nForegrounding tensions between narrative “details” and “design” and \nconceptions of “ruin” and “restoration”, this thesis explores how Faulkner’s \nYoknapatawpha novels function simultaneously as “open” and “closed”. It considers \nhow Absalom, Absalom! (1936) attempts to recuperate the repressed historical \nconnections present in Flags in the Dust (1929), only to erase them once more through \ndeath, destruction, and narrative closure. It considers how Go Down, Moses (1942) \noffers models of black domesticity that resist the oppressions of segregation and \nlynching – but which are dispersed through black diaspora and narrative exclusion. It \nconsiders how The Mansion (1959) revises and integrates details from earlier \nYoknapatawpha texts to create a richly layered textual space – but which is in constant \ntension with the process of the historical “whitening” of the Southern post-plantation \nlandscape which it ultimately depicts. Building Yoknapatawpha concludes by \nattempting to resolve these tensions into a new model of literary reading: \ndeconstructing Yoknapatawpha to reassemble it as a layered “mapping” of multiple \nparallel narrative paths and connective links, which resist the mastery – and erasure – \nimposed by linearity and closure.
Author: Edward Clough
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W640098681