四． 应用  Selected Reading: Indian Camp

　　(1) Theme: Hemingway's concern about violence and death by revealing Nick's feeling of perplexity, anxiety and terror over the misery of life and death.
(2) Characterization: "Indian Camp" relates the story of young Nick watching his father deliver an Indian woman of a baby by Caesarian section with a jack-knife and without anesthesia to relieve the pain. The cries of the mother and the cruel death of the husband brings the boy into contact with something that is perplexing and unpleasant. And this is actually Nick's initiation into the pain and violence of birth and death. The reader is impressed by Nick's innocence and perplexity over the misery of life and death.
Nick Adams is, when he first grows up, the early Hemingway protagonist, introduced to a world of violence, disorder, and death, and learning the hard way about what the world is like. Growing up in violent and dismal surroundings, Nick is psychologically and emotionally wounded and is later alienated from the society. The wound is a symbol and the climax for a process of the development of the character of Hemingway Hero; it is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual disgrace.
(3) Language: Hemingway sought to endow prose with the density of poetry, making each image, each scene and each rendered act serve several purposes.

Ⅵ. William Faulkner (1897-l962)

一． 一般识记 　His life and writing:

　　Faulkner is the most powerful and eloquent representative of American Southern writers. American Southern writers mainly write about the histiry, customs, people and social change of the American South, a region that contains much beauty, violence, passion, courage and, finally tragedy. It was from the region's characteristics that Faulkner drew the material for most of his fiction.
Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi and raised in nearby Oxford, and lived there almost all his life. He left school in his teens and later studied as aspecial student at the University of Mississippi. Fond of literature, he was increasingly motivated to become a writer. In 1918, he enlisted in the British Royal Flying Corps. Later he travelled Europe and learned the experimental writing of James Joyce and of the ideas of Sigmund Freud. He died of a heart attack in Oxford, Mississippi.

　　二． 识记
His major works: Faulkner published a volume of poetry The Mirble Faun (1924) and his first novel Soldiers' Pay (1926). In writing Sartoris (l929), he began to see and feel the dignity and sorrow of what was to become his most frequently used subject matter. The Sound and the Fury was considered as the work of a major writer. His other major works include As I Lay Dying (l930), Light in August (l932), Absalom, Absalom (1936), Wild Palms (1939) and The Hamlet (1940). The Unvanquished (1938) and Go Down Moses (1942) are thematica1ly interwoven. An anthology of his writings is entitled The Portable Faulkner. In l950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for the anti-racist Intruder in the Dust (1948). His other remarkable novels include Requiem for a Nun (l951), The Fable (1954), The Town (1957), and The Mansion(1959).
Of Faulkner's literary works, four novels are masterpieces by any standards: The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. The Sound and the Fury is his acclaimed masterpiece, an account of the tragic downfall of the Compson family. It is a story of "lost innocence," which proves itself to be an intensification of the theme of imprisonment in the past. Faulkner develops the theme of deterioration and loss by juxtaposing the childhood of the Compson brothers with their present experience. As a resu1t, the novel not merely relates Quentin's nosta1gic feeling about the past, or a Southern family that remains trapped within its past, but conveys a strong sense of grief over the deterioration of the South from the past to the present.
The major concern of Light in August is primarily about the South as a state of mind. In this novel, different attitudes towards life - plainly obsessions with the past, with blood or race and solely concern with bringing forth and preserving life - represented by different major characters.
Absalom, Absalom! is a novel entirely of the attempts to explain the past, characterized by involutions of narrative structure. It is immensely complex, for it is both a "historical novel" and a novel about history as an epistemological problem.
Go Down, Moses is in a sense a companion piece to Absalom, Absalom! but at the same time another and very different attempt to handle the Southern reality of land, family and the plantation as a form of life. In this book, Faulkner illuminates the problem of b1ack and white in Southern society as a close-knit destiny of blood brotherhood.
The best story to highlight Faulkner's concern is "The Bear" in which the view of the moral abomination of slavery and the human entanglements goes beyond history, to the beginnings, to the mythic time. In this story, Fau1kner skillfully emp1oys an o1d crafty bear as a symbol of the timeless freedom of the wilderness.

　　三．领会  1. Yoknapatawpha County as the setting:
Most of Faulkner's works are set in the American South, with his emphasis on the Southern subjects and consciousness. They are about people from a sma1l region in Northern Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha County, which is actually an imaginary place based on Faulkner's childhood memory about the town of Oxford in his native Lafayette County. With his rich imagination, Faulkner turned the land, the people and the history of the region into a literary creation and a mythical kingdom. The Yoknapatawpha stories deal, generally, with the historical period from the Civil War up to the 1920s when the First World War broke out, and people of a stratified society, the aristocrats, the new rich, the poor whites, and the blacks. As a result, Yoknapatawpha County has become an allegory or a parable of the Old South, with which Faulkner has managed successfully to show a panorama of the experience and consciousness of the whole Southern society. The Yoknapatawpha saga is Faulkner's real achievement.
2. The thematic pattern:
Most of the major themes are directly related to the tragic collision or confrontation between the old South and the new South (or the civilized modern society) represented by different characters in his novels.
(1) Faulkner exemplified T. S. Eliot's concept of modern society as a wasteland in a dramatic way. He lamented the decline of the old South and condemned the mechanized, industrialized society which has dehumanized man by forcing him to cultivate fa1se values and decrease those essential human values such as love, courage, fortitude, honesty and goodness. Faulkner held tolerance and compassion with traditional values such as serenity and elegance on one hand, and recognized the need to redefine and reaffirm them on the other.
(2) The past and the present, nature and society are always juxtaposed in his works. Almost all of his protagonists turn out to be tragic because they are prisoners of the past, or of the society, or of some social and moral taboos, or of their own introspective personalities. By describing his protagonists the way he does, Faulkner suggests that society, which conditions man with its hierarchical stratification and with its laws, the civi1ization and socia1 institutions, eliminates man's chance of responding naturally to the experiences of his existence. Man, turning away from reality by alienating himself from truth with his attempts to explain the inexplicable, becomes weak and cowardly, confused and ineffectua1.
3. Faulkner's narrative technique:
He has always been regarded as a man with great might of invention and experimentation. He added to the theory of the novel as an art form and evolved his own literary strategies.
(1) Withdrawal of the author as a controlling narrator: To him, the primary duty of a writer was to explore and represent the infinite possibilities inherent in human life. Therefore a writer should observe with no judgement whatsoever and reduce authorial intrusion to the lowest minimum.
(2) Dislocation of the narrative time: The most characteristic way of structuring his stories is to fragment the chronological time. He deliberately broke up the chrono1ogy of his narrative by juxtaposing the past with the present, in the way the montage does in a movie.
(3) The modern stream-of-consciousness technique and the interior monologue: Stream-of-consciousness technique was frequent1y and skillfully exploited by Faulkner to emphasize the reactions and inner musings of the narrator. And the interior monologue helps him achieve the most desirable effect of exploring the nature of human consciousness.
(4) Multiple points of view: The employment of several narrators or narrative points of views to tell a story, thus making the structure of the book somewhat radiative. For example, The Sound and the Fury uses four different narrative voices to piece together the story and thus challenges the reader by presenting a fragmented plot told from multiple points of view.
(5) The other narrative techniques he used to construct his stories include symbolism and mythological and biblical a11usions.

　　3. Faulkner's language: He was a master of his own particular style of writing. Great writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and James Joyce all had a part in influencing Faulkner. His prose, marked by long and embedded sentences, complex syntax, and vague reference pronouns and a variety of "registers" of the English language, is very difficu1t to read. In contrast, Faulknen cou1d sound very casual or informal sometimes. He captured the dialects of the Mississippi characters. Most of the symbols and imageries are drawn from nature.

　　四． 应用　A Rose for Emily
(1) The theme: "A Rose for Emily" is Faulkner's first short story published in 1930. Set in the town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha, the story expresses Faulkner's theme of the confrontation of the old South and the civilized modern society. Emily is in collision with the industrialized and mechanized society by clinging to the past and alienating herself from the modern society, which makes her a tragic victim.
(2) Characterization: As a descendent of the Southern aristocracy, Emily Grierson is typical of those in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha stories that are symbols of the old South but also the prisoners of the past. Firstly, she depended on her father and clang to his memory by remaining unmarried because of dominance of her father and his rigid ideas about social status, by keeping his portrait in a prominent place in her living room, by refusing to release her father's dead body for burial and by assuming her father's domineering traits ( She "carries her head high in her dignity as the last Grierson." ) Secondly, Emily was eccentric in refusing to accept the passage of time or the inevitable social change by refusing to pay taxes, buying poison and offering no explanation and refusing to cooperate with modern postal service. Thirdly, Emily demonstrates her deformed personality and abnormality in her relationship with her sweetheart. Her refusal to adapt herself to the new order and her defiance of the old order are not just pathetic attempts to cling to the past, but developed into obsession and homicidal mania by killing Homer Barren in order to keep him.
However, it is important to remember that Emily, for all her eccentricities, not to mention her serious mental illness, is never laughed at or treated with contempt or disgust. She is seen first and foremost as a tragic human being. Though twisted by forces beyond her control, her struggle to assert her will even in madness, has something valiant and heroic about it. Faulkner holds tolerance and compassion for her tragedy on one hand, because she displays serenity and elegance in character; he partially condemns her alienation of herself from the reality which makes her tragedy inevitable.
(3) Stylitic features: In this story, Faulkner also employed the dislocated time sequence by juxtaposing the past with the present. The story is divided into five sections which represent five petals of rose. Faulkner makes best use of the Gothic devices in narration to dramatize Emily's deformed personality and abnormality in her relationship with her sweetheart. Other narative techniques used in the story include the multiple points of view and symbolism. Take symbolism for example, Emily as "the fallen monument " is the symbol of tradition, the old South and old way of life, while gin and gasoline pumps, taxes, postal service are symbols of mechanized and civilized modern society. Rose is associated with love, but here "a dead rotten love." It shows Faulkner's sympathy or respect for Emily.