Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice

Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice PDF Author: Stephen M. Ross
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820313757
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
William Faulkner recognized voice as one of the most distinctive and powerful elements in fiction when he delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, describing the last sound at the end of the world as man's "puny inexhaustible voice, still talking." As a testimonial of an artist's faith in his art, the speech raised the value of voice to its highest reach for man, as "one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." In Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice, Stephen Ross explores the nature of voice in William Faulkner's fiction by examining the various modes of speech and writing that his texts employ. Beginning with the proposition that voice is deeply involved in the experience of reading Faulkner, Ross uses theoretically grounded notions of voice to propose new ways of explaining how Faulkner's novels and stories express meaning, showing how Faulkner used the affective power of voice to induce the reader to forget the silent and originless nature of written fiction. Ross departs from previous Faulkner criticism by proceeding not text-by-text or chronologically but by construction a workable taxonomy which defines the types of voice in Faulkner's fiction: phenomenal voice, a depicted event or object within the represented fictional world; mimetic voice, the illusion that a person is speaking; psychic voice, one heard only in the mind and overheard only through fiction's omniscience; and oratorical voice, an overtly intertextual voice which derives from a discursive practice--Southern oratory--recognizable outside the boundaries of any Faulkner text and identifiable as part of Faulkner's biographical and regional heritage. In Faulkner's own experience, listening was important. As he once confided to Malcolm Cowley, "I listen to the voices, and when I put down what the voices say, it's right." In Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice, Ross conducts a careful analysis of this fundamental source of power in Faulkner's fiction, concluding that the preponderance of voice imagery, represented talking, verbalized thought, and oratorical rhetoric and posturing makes the novels and stories fundamentally vocal. They derive their energy from the play of voices on the imaginative field of written language.

Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice

Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice PDF Author: Stephen M. Ross
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820313757
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
William Faulkner recognized voice as one of the most distinctive and powerful elements in fiction when he delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, describing the last sound at the end of the world as man's "puny inexhaustible voice, still talking." As a testimonial of an artist's faith in his art, the speech raised the value of voice to its highest reach for man, as "one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." In Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice, Stephen Ross explores the nature of voice in William Faulkner's fiction by examining the various modes of speech and writing that his texts employ. Beginning with the proposition that voice is deeply involved in the experience of reading Faulkner, Ross uses theoretically grounded notions of voice to propose new ways of explaining how Faulkner's novels and stories express meaning, showing how Faulkner used the affective power of voice to induce the reader to forget the silent and originless nature of written fiction. Ross departs from previous Faulkner criticism by proceeding not text-by-text or chronologically but by construction a workable taxonomy which defines the types of voice in Faulkner's fiction: phenomenal voice, a depicted event or object within the represented fictional world; mimetic voice, the illusion that a person is speaking; psychic voice, one heard only in the mind and overheard only through fiction's omniscience; and oratorical voice, an overtly intertextual voice which derives from a discursive practice--Southern oratory--recognizable outside the boundaries of any Faulkner text and identifiable as part of Faulkner's biographical and regional heritage. In Faulkner's own experience, listening was important. As he once confided to Malcolm Cowley, "I listen to the voices, and when I put down what the voices say, it's right." In Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice, Ross conducts a careful analysis of this fundamental source of power in Faulkner's fiction, concluding that the preponderance of voice imagery, represented talking, verbalized thought, and oratorical rhetoric and posturing makes the novels and stories fundamentally vocal. They derive their energy from the play of voices on the imaginative field of written language.

Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice

Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice PDF Author: Stephen M. Ross
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description


Sound Effects: The Object Voice in Fiction

Sound Effects: The Object Voice in Fiction PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004304401
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Sound Effects combines literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory in eleven original articles which explore the potential of the object voice as an analytic tool to approach fiction. Alongside the gaze, the voice is Jacques Lacan’s original addition to the set of partial objects of classical psychoanalysis, and has only recently been theorised by Mladen Dolar in A Voice and Nothing More (2006). With notable exceptions like Garrett Stewart’s Reading Voices (1990), the sonorous element in fiction has received little scholarly attention in comparison with poetry and drama. Sound Effects is a contribution to the burgeoning field of sound studies, and sets out to fill this gap through selective readings of English and American fiction of the last two hundred years. Contributors: Fred Botting, Natalja Chestopalova, Mladen Dolar, Matt Foley, Alex Hope, Phillip Mahoney, Sylvia Mieszkowski, Jorge Sacido-Romero, Marcin Stawiarski, Garrett Stewart, Peter Weise, and Bruce Wyse.

Figures of Division

Figures of Division PDF Author: James A. Snead
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351590065
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Originally published in 1986. William Faulkner’s major novels represent one of the earliest American explorations into the paradoxes inherent in both literary discourse and racial segregation in the American South. Figures of Division demonstrates that these works reject conventional divisions and a social and linguistic deception, and discover a reality where people merge across social boundaries. This analysis of Faulkner’s narrative discourse shows for the first time that the mechanisms of social division profoundly affect both the content and the form of his major novels.

Forensic Fictions

Forensic Fictions PDF Author: Jay Watson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Forensic Fictions is the first book-length critical study of William Faulkner's fictional depictions of the legal vocation and the practice of law. Examining Faulkner's lawyer characters in light of the southern storytelling tradition, Jay Watson argues that the forensic competence of the Faulknerian lawyer is a direct function of his skill as a raconteur. To trace the biographical and historical roots of Faulkner's lifelong preoccupation with the legal profession, Watson draws on contemporary scholarship in narrative, rhetoric, jurisprudence, legal and intellectual history, literary theory, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. His approach yields insightful readings of forensic characters and scenes from such works as "An Odor of Verbena," The Hamlet, "Wild Palms," Absalom, Absalom! and The Reivers. Watson shows the links between storytelling and the competence of Faulkner's legal characters by examining the intertextual logic that connects the two most important lawyers in the Yoknapatawpha fiction: the incompetent Horace Benbow and the more capable Gavin Stevens, whose entrance into Faulkner's oeuvre coincides with Benbow's untimely departure from it. Focusing on the nine novels in which these two characters appear, Watson traces the evolutionary process by which Stevens supplants Benbow. Three of the Stevens novels--Intruder in the Dust, Knight's Gambit, and Requiem for a Nun--from what Watson calls Faulkner's "forensic trilogy" and, when read together, constitute the writer's most sustained investigation of the rhetorical and ethical responsibilities of the lawyer-citizen. Faulkner, Watson argues, saw the forensic figure as a potential hybrid of homo loquens and homo politicus, capable of combing the roles of storyteller, rhetorician, and theatrical performer with those of critic, citizen, and ethical man. As such, this figure served as a provocative authorial surrogate through whom Faulkner could explore diverse and often contradictory aspects of his personal experience, his family background, his cultural heritage, and, most of all, his own artistic use of language.

Go Down, Moses

Go Down, Moses PDF Author: William Faulkner
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307792145
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
“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.” —William Faulkner, on receiving the Nobel Prize Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight.

Literary Voice

Literary Voice PDF Author: Donald Wesling
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438423896
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Jacques Derrida has ably analyzed the writing that is in speaking, but this reply to his work analyzes the speaking that is in writing. This book defends and illustrates literary voice against modern philosophy's critique of the spoken, and in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism and Henri Meschonnic's studies on subjectivity in rhythmic language. The authors find literary voice to be maximal in bardic speech, where the author speaks for the nation. This full voice stands between the two minimums of the body (grunts and sighs and birdsong), and the material text (loss of logic, narrative, and social tones in Nietzsche and in the American LANGUAGE poets).

Audio Book

Audio Book PDF Author: Mikko Keskinen
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739118313
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Audio Book deals with the ways in which various technologies enabling the transmission or storing of sound and voice are figured in selected works drawn from contemporary narrative fiction. The sound technologies are shown to influence the narrative structure, metaphorics, and style of the works studied.

Obscurity's Myriad Components

Obscurity's Myriad Components PDF Author: R. Rio-Jelliffe
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838754627
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
On that paradoxical premise, Faulkner's theory addresses the writer's dilemma of having only the inadequate word to surmount itself; and the practice in fiction seeks to vanquish the enemy, not in the wordless, as it is often denoted, but in silence past the word."--BOOK JACKET.

Faulkner in the Eighties

Faulkner in the Eighties PDF Author: John Earl Bassett
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 9780810824850
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
This bibliography brings up through 1989 the comprehensive listing of scholarship and criticism on William Faulkner begun by Bassett in two earlier books, William Faulkner: An Annotated Checklist of Criticism (1972) and Faulkner: An Annotated Checklist of Recent Criticism (1983). Since the latter, over a hundred books on Faulkner have been completed, along with hundreds of articles and dissertations. This work lists all new items, often with extensive annotations, and provides separate entries for chapters of books that cover individual novels and stories. Bassett's introductory essay provides an overview of the last decade of Faulkner studies, the first in which post-structuralist and other newer forms of criticism had a major impact on Faulkner studies.