Faulkner S Revision Of Absalom Absalom

Faulkner’s Revision of Absalom, Absalom! is a study of the creative process as exemplified in one of the major achievements in twentieth-century fiction. Portions of the original handwritten version of the story are collated, line by line, with corresponding sections of the published version. In an introductory discussion the major changes are analyzed and evaluated. It is particularly interesting to observe Faulkner revising not only his choice of words and the construction of his sentences but also the central design of the story. Most notably, he changed his mind about having it known from the beginning that Charles Bon was Sutpen’s part-Negro son, and he developed Quentin Compson into the pivotal figure who finally supplies this missing piece of information. In the process of revision Absalom, Absalom! became a kind of detective story, and the reader is forced to join the quest and participate in the undertaking which is the basic subject of the book—the human attempt to comprehend and deal with the past. To trace the process of this revision is to experience a sharp focusing of theme and to witness a demonstration of how the meaning of a fictional work can shape its structure and, in turn, stand revealed by what has become the outward sign, or form, of that meaning.

The story concerns Thomas Sutpen, a poor man who finds wealth and then marries into a respectable family. His ambition and extreme need for control bring about his ruin and the ruin of his family. Sutpen’s story is told by several narrators, allowing the reader to observe variations in the saga as it is recounted by different speakers.—Goodreads.com.

Also: Absalom, Absalom! is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, first published in 1936. Taking place before, during, and after the American Civil War, it is a story about three families of the American South, with a focus on the life of Thomas Sutpen.

Outraged and Amazed focuses on how Absalom, Absalom!’s complex narrative functions as a vehicle through which social order in the South is represented, challenged and renegotiated. Exploring Quentin Compson’s attempt to understand his own identity through the complicated and incomplete story of Thomas Sutpen, it demonstrates how the poetics, structure and central conflicts of the novel derive from a combination of its characters’ intense resistance to their proscribed social limitations and their desire to wrest control of their identities through and from the act of storytelling. Intending to present a narrative that could explain the past in a way that makes sense of their world and their place in it, these would-be authors are instead confronted with their limitations and the inadequacy of their knowledge. Outraged and Amazed explores the bewildering, tangled, dislocated, and confused story we are left with – a story of the South that is plausible but unverifiable, at once self-reflexively fictive and true.

The story of an old Southern tragedy which befalls the Sutpen family. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Quentin Compson narrates the story of his family’s African-American washerwoman, Nancy, who fears that her husband will murder her because she is pregnant with a white-man’s child. The events in the story are witnessed by a young Quentin and his two siblings, Caddy and Jason, who do not fully understand the adult world of race and class conflict that they are privy to. Although primarily known for his novels, William Faulkner wrote in a variety of formats, including plays, poetry, essays, screenplays, and short stories, many of which are highly acclaimed and anthologized. Like his novels, many of Faulkner’s short stories are set in fictional Yoknapatawapha County, a setting inspired by Lafayette County, where Faulkner spent most of his life. His first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includes many of his most frequently anthologized stories, including "A Rose for Emily", "Red Leaves" and "That Evening Sun." HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

Throughout his career, William Faulkner produced a literary discourse remarkably contiguous with other discourses of American culture, but seldom has his work been explored as a participant in the shifts and ruptures that characterize modern discursive systems. Charles Hannon argues in his brilliant new study that the language of Faulkner's fiction is replete with the voiced conflicts that shaped America and the South from the 1920s to1950. Specifically, Hannon takes five contemporary debates -- in historiography, law, labor, ethnography, and film -- and relates them both to canonical and less-discussed texts of Faulkner. Hannon employs a theoretical middle ground between Michael Bakhtin's stylistics of the novel and Michel Foucault's model of discourse as an autonomous self-regulated domain, while also drawing from the vast critical literature on Faulkner's fiction. He begins by linking the story cycle The Unvanquished to the battle over interpretations of American history as voiced by the Nashville Agrarians on the one hand and W. E. B. DuBois on the other. Next Hannon shows how Faulkner's detective fiction of the early 1930s and portions of his novel The Hamlet were affected by the emerging schism between adherents of a new school of legal realism and those bound to a more conservative formalist jurisprudence. According to Hannon, Faulkner's great novel Absalom, Absalom! reflects in its depiction of various forms of labor one of Franklin Roosevelt's major New Deal accomplishments -- the Wagner Act of 1935 -- as well as contract disputes in the agricultural and manufacturing South and in the film studios of Hollywood. Hannon discusses Faulkner's experimentation in The Hamlet vis-á-vis the development of the ethnographic method in the field of anthropology. He concludes with a fascinating analysis of the filming of Intruder in the Dust in Faulkner's hometown of Oxford, Mississippi. Through Hannon's keen interpretive readings, Faulkner's texts emerge as a complex "node" in the larger discursive conflicts of his time. Though he often seemed to be detached from influence, Faulkner was, Hannon reveals, intensely attentive to ideas at the fore.

Absalom, Absalom! has long been seen as one of William Faulkner's supreme creations, as well as one of the leading American novels of the twentieth century. In this collection Fred Hobson has brought together eight of the most stimulating essays on Absalom, essays written over a thirty-year span which approach the novel both formally and historically. Here are critical responses by Cleanth Brooks, John Irwin, Thadious Davis, and Eric Sundquist, as well as four essays published in the last decade. The casebook concludes with Faulkner's own remarks on the novel, delivered in a discussion with students at the University of Virginia. What emerges from all the selections is a rich and suggestive treatment of a work which Faulkner himself called "the best novel yet written by an American" and a less biased critic has called "the greatest American novel of the century... joining Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn at the pinnacle of American fiction."

Absalom (Hebrew mean "father of peace") was the third son of David, King of Israel with Maacah, daughter of Talmai, King of Geshur. Absalom, Absalom! details the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a white man born into poverty in western Virginia who moves to Mississippi with the dual aims of gaining wealth and becoming a powerful family patriarch. The story is told entirely in flashbacks narrated mostly by Quentin Compson to his roommate at Harvard College, Shreve, who frequently contributes his own suggestions and surmises. The narration of Rosa Coldfield, and Quentin's father and grandfather, are also included and re-interpreted by Shreve and Quentin, with the total events of the story unfolding in nonchronological order and often with differing details. This results in a peeling-back-the-onion revelation of the true story of the Sutpens. Rosa initially narrates the story, with long digressions and a biased memory, to Quentin Compson, whose grandfather was a friend of Sutpen's. Quentin's father then fills in some of the details to Quentin. Finally, Quentin relates the story to his roommate Shreve, and in each retelling, the reader receives more details as the parties flesh out the story by adding layers. The final effect leaves the reader more certain about the attitudes and biases of the characters than about the facts of Sutpen's story. Thomas Sutpen arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi, with some slaves and a French architect who has been somehow forced into working for him. Sutpen obtains one hundred square miles of land from a local Native American tribe and immediately begins building a large plantation called Sutpen's Hundred, including an ostentatious mansion. All he needs to complete his plan is a wife to bear him a few children (particularly a son to be his heir), so he ingratiates himself with a local merchant and marries the man's daughter, Ellen Coldfield. Ellen bears Sutpen two children, a son named Henry and a daughter named Judith, both of whom are destined for tragedy. Henry goes to the University of Mississippi and meets fellow student Charles Bon, who is ten years his senior. Henry brings Charles home for Christmas, and Charles and Judith begin a quiet romance that leads to a presumed engagement. However, Thomas Sutpen realizes that Charles Bon is his son from an earlier marriage and moves to stop the proposed union. Sutpen had worked on a plantation in the French West Indies as overseer and, after subduing a slave uprising, was offered the hand of the plantation owner's daughter, Eulalia Bon. She bore him a son, Charles. Sutpen did not know that Eulalia was of mixed race until after the marriage and birth of Charles, but when he discovered that he had been deceived, he renounced the marriage as void and left his wife and child (though leaving them his fortune as part of his own moral recompense). The reader also later learns of Sutpen's childhood, when young Thomas learned that society could base human worth on material worth. It is this episode that sets into motion Thomas' plan to start a dynasty.