Publicação
Between demythologization and transcendence: Faulkner’s poetics of historical trauma
| datacite.subject.fos | Humanidades::Línguas e Literaturas | |
| dc.contributor.author | Constandache, Ioana | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-03-17T12:08:20Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2026-03-17T12:08:20Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2025 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This paper offers a critical analysis of William Faulkner’s status as an unconventional novelist, examining how short prose decisively contributes to the construction of his mythopoetic universe. Building on Malcolm Cowley’s observation that Faulkner does not write traditional novels but fragments of a discontinuous macrotext, this study argues that narrative fragmentation—expressed through the rejection of linearity, the plurality of voices, and temporal distortion—constitutes the authentic mode of his literary modernism, as evidenced in ‘‘The Bear’’ and ‘‘That Evening Sun’’. The analysis focuses on the ways in which these short stories, though formally autonomous, are later organically integrated into major novels, revealing a circular compositional strategy and Faulkner’s sustained engagement with memory and historical consciousness. Yoknapatawpha County is approached as a symbolic, mythical space where memory, trauma, and history intersect within a nonlinear, stratified temporality, linking personal experience to collective inheritance. In contrast to Hemingway’s stylistic economy, Faulkner’s discourse is marked by density, ambiguity, and cumulative meaning, embodying two opposing paradigms of representing reality. In Faulkner’s vision, myth no longer guarantees ontological stability but becomes fluid and contested, shaped by modernity’s identity crisis, as his narratives negotiate historical trauma and its ethical implications. From this perspective, the paper reassesses Faulkner’s influence on narrative postmodernism and reconsiders short prose as the generative nucleus of a tense, original literary mythology. | eng |
| dc.identifier.doi | 10.34640/univmadeiracjhs1constandache | |
| dc.identifier.issn | 3051-8059 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10400.13/7646 | |
| dc.language.iso | eng | |
| dc.peerreviewed | yes | |
| dc.publisher | Universidade da Madeira. Faculdade de Artes e Humanidades (FAH) | |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ | |
| dc.subject | Faulkner | |
| dc.subject | Modernism | |
| dc.subject | Short prose | |
| dc.subject | Literary myth | |
| dc.subject | Yoknapatawpha | |
| dc.subject | . | |
| dc.subject | Faculdade de Artes e Humanidades | |
| dc.title | Between demythologization and transcendence: Faulkner’s poetics of historical trauma | eng |
| dc.type | journal article | |
| dspace.entity.type | Publication | |
| oaire.citation.endPage | 71 | |
| oaire.citation.startPage | 45 | |
| oaire.citation.title | Commentarium: Journal of Humanities Studies, | |
| oaire.citation.volume | 1 | |
| oaire.version | http://purl.org/coar/version/c_970fb48d4fbd8a85 |