teaching faulkner.docx

1、teaching faulknerteaching william faulkner in high school advanced placement classroomsRichard S. Turner IntroductionAs a high school English teacher for twenty-nine years, I have been a close colleague of many teachers of American literature. To my knowledge, my colleagues have never taught a novel

2、 by Faulkner and have only occasionally taught the one short story included in the literature text. They have usually ignored the Nobel Prize speech that has also been included in the literature anthology. Although I have taught British literature during my career, I have always maintained a fascina

3、tion for the literature of William Faulkner. I have read all of his novels and most of his short stories. I believe him to be the greatest American writer of the twentieth century. It is my contention that the literature of Faulkner should be taught in high schools and that several of his novels and

4、 short stories should be included in the English curriculum of all high schools in America. It is my hope that the findings of this study illuminate specific reasons that his literature is being taught and various reasons that high school Advanced Placement English teachers are avoiding Faulkners wo

5、rk. The findings may enable high school curriculum developers and English teachers to reexamine the extent to which Faulkner is included in the curriculum and how he is taught in the classroom. The high school English curriculum is closely connected with the specific literature text which has been a

6、dopted by the school district. Teachers usually follow a chronology of selections provided by textbook companies. Most texts used in high schools contain at least one short story by Faulkner. The selections most often included are A Rose for Emily, Barn Burning, Spotted Horses, and sections of The B

7、ear. Many texts include the Nobel Prize speech. The English curriculum in most high schools includes a supplemental reading list which consists of recommended literary selections chosen by the teachers as a department. These selections are novels or plays that are not included in the literature text

8、 being used in the classroom. There may be certain titles that are required by the department and must be taught, but for the most part, they are selections that teachers choose because they feel they are important to teach and because they enjoy reading and teaching them. Several novels and short s

9、tories written by William Faulkner can be included on high school reading lists and if taught would enhance student experiences of American literature. Malcolm Cowley in his classic introduction to The Portable Faulkner said, Faulkners novels have the quality of being lived, absorbed, remembered rat

10、her than merely observed. And they have what is rare in the novels of our time, a warmth of family affection, brother for brother and sister, the father for his children - a love so warm and proud that it tries to shut out the rest of the world (p. xxviii). It is difficult to imagine someone reading

11、 the final scenes of Light in August and not being moved by the fate of Joe Christmas. It is hard to imagine that a reader can experience the journey with the Bundren family to bury Addie in As I Lay Dying and not be a better person for the experience. In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner used nineteen diffe

12、rent narrators - some only once, others several times - to tell a single story. This was an original and unique style that no other prominent writer has attempted since. What student can experience Faulkners encapsulation of the world in The Sound and the Fury and not come to a deeper understanding

13、of himself and his place in that world? Can any reader experience Go Down, Moses with its indignities, insufferable violence, and unspeakable wrongs that the Southern white has inflicted on the Black and not come to a deeper sensibility of human morality for all of mankind? Literature allows student

14、s to understand the heritage of the past. Faulkner teaches us better than most writers what it means to be an American, not just an American from the South. We must each learn to share the heritage wrought by slavery and learn to understand the prejudice and greed that forged its development. More t

15、han most writers, Faulkner is able to lead us to a personal understanding of mans inhumanity to man. There are authors who are more lyrical and romantic, authors who can move us momentarily by a rhetorical eloquence, but Faulkner at his best moves us because we become actively involved with his char

16、acters. Cowley (1946) says, it is by his best that we should judge him, as every other author; and Faulkner at his best - even sometimes at his worst - has a power, a richness of life, an intensity to be found in no other American writer of our time (p. xxv). In Go Down, Moses Faulkner created young

17、 Ike McCaslin who learns the oneness of all nature and that blood does not matter, that Sam Fathers, Negro, White, and Indian, is Sam Fathers, a man. He also learns love and pity for all living creatures and that there is a code of nature by which we should all live. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulk

18、ner gives us one of his greatest creations, the humble Negro servant Dilsey. She has remained the steadfast center of the Compson household. According to Edmund Volpe (1964), The source of her strength is her humanity. She is incapable of thinking in abstractions, in terms of servant or employer, Ne

19、gro or White, hers is a genuine response to individuals and to life (p. 124). Faulkner creates the embodiment of evil in the character of Popeye in his novel Sanctuary. He lies outside the circle of human corruption and is a link between human and cosmic evil. He is a character who is alien to the n

20、atural world and to the human species. With Faulkners creation of the Negro Lucas Beauchamp in Intruder in the Dust, he is able to pay tribute to the strength and endurance of the Negro race. Lucas is too proud to acquiesce in submission, too self-contained to be either outcast or rebel. According t

21、o Irving Howe (1975), Lucas challenges many of the notions Faulkner had previously expressed about Negroes. He is a member of an oppressed group who appears not as a catalogue of disabilities or even virtues, but as a human being in his own right. He is not a form of behavior but a person, not Negro

22、 but a Negro (p. 129). Perhaps Howe speaks for every reader who has come to love Faulkners living characterizations: Even those readers distrustful of Faulkners style or repelled by his violence must be struck by the amplitude, vitality, and high coloring of the figures that move across the Yoknapat

23、awpha landscape. Although Faulkners plots are sometimes too cumbersome and tricky for the matter they convey, and his reflections can become turgid and pretentious, his characters seldom fail us (p. 4). Speaking in Pakistan in 1957, Faulkner said, it is men and women that matter, the characters. I d

24、ont write the stories. When the characters come alive, they write the stories themselves by behaving as they should (Inge, p. 151). Faulkner has never created a single character of the magnitude of Shakespeares Hamlet and Falstaff, Melvilles Ahab or Flauberts Emma Bovary. His greatness lies in the d

25、evelopment of a body of characters which surely rivals those created by Shakespeare and Dickens. And to my way of thinking, it is this masterful body of characterization to which high school students should be exposed if they are to truly understand the human spirit as it is embodied in the study of

26、 American literature. This dissertation provides the reader with a new insight into one of Americas foremost writers of fiction. It gives teachers of American literature an extensive chronology of literary, pedagogical, and curricular criticism on Faulkner. It also provides teachers with a number of

27、 valuable teaching materials that can be used in the high school classroom. This study captures the voices of Advanced Placement high school teachers who enjoy teaching Faulkner each year, the voices of students who engage in that study, and the voices of teachers who choose not to include Faulkner

28、in the canon of writers they assign each year. This dissertation acquaints and reacquaints readers with Faulkners writing through the commentary of literary scholars, the myriad of fascinating characters from his fiction, and the voice of Faulkner himself. Each page makes a passionate case for the i

29、nclusion of Faulkner in the high school classroom and the language arts curriculum document.Conclusions and RecommendationsIn April of 1939, William Faulkner, describing his own sense of mastery while finishing The Hamlet, wrote to his publisher, Robert Haas, I am the best in America, by God (Minter

30、, p.178). There are certainly high school teachers, as reflected in this study, who would disagree with this self-assessment by Faulkner. They are quick to criticize his writing as unstructured, incomprehensible, racist, and filled with repugnant sex and violence. They point to examples of stream of

31、 consciousness that run for several pages or vulgarity as seen in the character Percy Grimm who says of Joe Christmas in Liqht in August, Jesus Christ. Has every preacher and old maid in Jefferson taken their pants down to the yellowbellied son of a bitch? (p. 512) These Advanced Placement teachers

32、are adamantly opposed to teaching Faulkner in their classrooms. But this study also reveals that Faulkner and his fiction are alive and well in many high school Advanced Placement classrooms. Teachers who embrace his writing point out that it has a beautiful eloquence as reflected in an entire secti

33、on devoted to the character Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying:And then he died. He did not know he was dead. I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the dark land talking of Gods love and His beauty and His sin; hearing the dark voicelessness in which the words are the deeds, and the other words that are not deeds,