Artigo Revisado por pares

As I Lay Dying: Demise of Vision

1989; Duke University Press; Volume: 61; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2926516

ISSN

1527-2117

Autores

Carolyn Norman Slaughter,

Tópico(s)

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

Resumo

THE criticism of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying manifests the heterogeneity, the ambivalence, and the outright contradiction that characterize Faulkner criticism in general.' Meanwhile the work continues to provoke ever more provocative commentary. Among traditional interpretations that even yet attempt to find meaning as statement, nontraditional readings are beginning to let the meaning lie while they follow Faulkner's strange experiments with time and space, with memory and imagination, with consciousness and unconsciousness.2 Still, whatever the reading, it is usually expressed in terms of rationalist thinking, i.e., in negative terms, as disruption, disjunction, vacancy, and absence, as distortion and loss. The only novelty I hope to offer is that my interest is to describe what shows up or what happens where old meanings have disappeared without merely speaking in reverse. Exploring the novel's explicit treatment of language, my study will make its way literally along, searching the bare bones of the narrative, attempting not to repeat or to archaeologically reconstitute the work, but to follow alongside it in a thinking. It is Addie who gives emphasis to (raises the spectre of) language as such. Words, she claims, are ineffectual.

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