Alexander Marshall

Bio: Alexander Marshall is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Connection (mathematics). The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 5 citations.

Ties of Blood: Gender, Race, and Faulkner

Abstract: This dissertation proposes a new reading of William Faulkner's career from his first novel, Soldiers' Pay (1926), through The Sound and the Fury (1929). I argue that Faulkner's probing of sexual relations in the 1920s provides the necessary context for understanding his treatment of race relations in the 1930s, and that his turn toward the issue of miscegenation should be read as a moment of crisis and transformation, in which racial anxiety explodes within an established landscape of sexual anxiety that takes the female body as its troubled matrix. Reading this crisis requires that we rethink the overall shape of Faulkner's career, starting with the text widely regarded as his first important novel. By resituating The Sound and the Fury within the context of the earlier, under-appreciated writings-- Soldiers' Pay , Elmer , Mosquitoes , and Flags in the Dust --I argue that the novel is a pivotal rather than seminal text, one that newly articulates the psychosexual drama of the early career to the socio-historical problems that will increasingly occupy Faulkner in his subsequent work. Only when we see how the inward, psychological explorations of the early writings enable Faulkner's engagement with the U.S. South, and how his turn toward his native soil expands and enriches the solipsistic landscapes of the previous novels, can we begin to understand the complex ways that gender and race, psychosexual trauma and historical injury, speak through, for and over one another in the author's later work.

‘Some Can’t Be That Simple’: Flannery O’Connor’s Debt to French Symbolism

Abstract: In this thesis, I trace the influence of French Symbolist poetry on the works of Flannery O’Connor. Many of O’Connor’s influences are well-known and documented, including Catholicism, the South, modern fiction, and her battle with lupus. However, I argue that Symbolism, via its influence on Modernist literature, is another major influence. In particular, I focus on several aspects of O’Connor’s writing: the recurrence of the same symbol across multiple works, the central location of symbols in several stories, the use of private symbols of the author’s invention, and use of symbol, rather than language, to convey transcendence. Aided by the scholarship of critics such as Richard Giannone, Laurence Porter, and Margaret Early Whitt, I argue that there is much in the aesthetic of Flannery O’Connor to suggest that her writing is, in part, a legacy of the French Symbolists.

Faulkner's First War: Conflict, Mimesis, and the Resonance of Defeat

Abstract: In AprIl of 1962, WIllIAm fAulkner visited the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. Among other events, he submitted to a question and answer session before a class titled “The Evolution of American Ideals as Reflected in American Literature” (the syllabus for which contained Faulkner’s short story “Turnabout”1). During the session, students asked the author what conclusions he intended the reader take away from the story, which concerns a blithe and callow British Midshipman being killed in action while a hardened American pilot survived; such questions (often framed within the “universal condition” ideas of Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, written some twenty years after drafting “Turnabout”), were met with polite circumvention.2 Faulkner had yet to formulate the ideas as to the “general and universal fear” of his prize address when he wrote the story in autumn/winter of 19313 (and the argument is to be made that he may never have developed that concept into a defined ideological statement). At the point at which he had written “Turnabout,” he had yet to reach, or had only recently reached, a critical juncture in his creative identity: Faulkner had yet to separate in his mind the First World War from the American Civil War, and, in doing so, to separate himself from the expatriate writing of his contemporaries to “make a single Mississippi county his measure of the world.”4 Faulkner’s early writing, particularly Soldiers’ Pay and the “Wasteland” stories5 reflect an authorial mindset calibrated on mimicking the writing of the other rising stars of his literary class. Flags in the Dust, often remarked as a turning point for the author in that it is the first of the Yoknapatawpha narratives, bears importance for the Faulkner corpus beyond the bounds of Mississippi; it represents the threshold at which Faulkner laid aside the question of his generation—the legacy of world war—to address the inter-generational issues of honor and decay—more nearly associated with Faulkner’s mythologized Civil War—that would characterize his career. Commentary has persistently linked Faulkner’s “apprentice” writings to other authors, works, or literary movements.6 More often than not, such assertions identify Faulkner not as an active participant in a given

Trying to say it all in one sentence : making meaning/making fiction and the syntax of despair in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

Abstract: The extremity of William Faulkner's use of relative clauses and appositives in Absalom, Absalom! is a syntactical representation of the inability of its narrators to create a satisfactory history of the Sutpen family, the South, and