Finding Camus's absurd in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom!
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The Department of English seeks to provide all university students with the skills of effective communication and critical thinking, as well as imparting knowledge of literature, creative writing, linguistics, speech and technical communication to students within and outside of the department.
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The Department of English and Speech was formed in 1939 from the merger of the Department of English and the Department of Public Speaking. In 1971 its name changed to the Department of English.
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1939-present
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- Department of English and Speech (1939-1971)
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- College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (parent college)
- Department of English (predecessor, 1898-1939)
- Department of Public Speaking (predecessor, 1898-1939)
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Abstract
Since their initial publications, the major works of William Faulkner have provoked wildly divergent interpretations. In contemporary Faulkner scholarship, critics often use feminist, racial, psychoanalytic and other post-structural frameworks to interpret As I Lay Dying (1930), The Sound and the Fury (1929), and Absalom, Absalom! (1937). In this thesis, I employ a philosophical framework often mentioned in passing by Faulkner critics but one which has not yet been consistently applied to his aforementioned works: that of the absurd, as articulated by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). The pairing of Camus and Faulkner is justified because each is concerned with the development of the individual as a function of reactions to uncontrollable external forces: Camus represents the movement from innocence, to despair, to transcendence by tracing a hypothetical person's progression, while Faulkner does so by artistic implication. Ultimately, interpreting Faulkner in this context provides both an existential framework for understanding his most tragic characters, and a rationale for Faulkner's notoriously fragmented structures and intense representations of subjectivities.