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Boiling Souls-A Study of the Dialogic Features of Light in August

Author: ChenBoYuan
Tutor: YuJianHua
School: Yangzhou University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: dialogue identity obsession polyphony Faulkner
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Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2008
Downloads: 148
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Abstract


William Faulkner’s Light in August is his first novel concerning the race issue. In this novel, Faulkner portrays an array of characters who are either obsessed with their own identities or their family heritage, thus they become victims of their own boiling souls. In depicting these characters, Faulkner adopts a dialogic stand so as to render an objective and independent display of the characters’personalities, their struggles and possible outcomes.Dialogism, first advocated by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, regards that the text is no longer the representation of the author’s consciousness therefore is in an independent status, so are the characters within. Dialogue in Bakhtin’s philosophy is not confined to the ordinary vocal dialogues between fictional characters, but extends to every possible dialogical relationship in the novel including that between characters, character and the author, and the given text and other texts. As a result, the fictional text is no longer equal to the monophony of a single voice, or the expression of a single ideology, but the polyphony of multiplied and different voices.This present thesis is to explore the dialogic features of Light in August in three distinctive perspectives: polyphony in the level of individual characters, the intertextual relationship between this novel and other texts, primarily the Bible, and the dialogical relationship in the novel’s structure.First, constant discussions are on the portrayal of the novel’s principal characters, who are obsessed with split personalities, and who hold ambivalent attitude towards family heritage. Therefore, dialogue and polyphony are inherently embedded in the fictional characters. Second, the numerous allusions to the Bible build up the intertextual connection between this novel and the broad Christian civilization, signifying this novel is having dialogues with the Bible, therefore represents but is not dictated by the ideology of the Christian civilization. And finally, in an attempt to throw maximum illumination on both the theme and the characters, the structure of the novel are deployed in quite a dialogical way, numerous flash-backs and the abruption in starting and terminating narratives are cases in point. Therefore, in the development of the novel as much as in the deployment of the chapters, the traditional diachronic sequence prescribed by any single logic is disrupted by the synchronic presence of multiple logics, allowing the narratives of various characters’to display themselves according to their own intrinsic logic. To sum up, the dialogic features based on these three distinctive perspectives allow this novel to fully exhibit the diversity and plurality of the fictional characters and the background from which they come from, producing polyphony of multiple different and independent voices.

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