Word: faulknerisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Once labeled a potential "kiss of death" by novelist Saul Bellow, after he won the prize in 1976, the Nobel can be a bittersweet distinction. For William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, the prize was a swan song, a tribute to past masterpieces whose greatness their subsequent work did not approach. For others, it's just a very prestigious distraction. Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 laureate, complained that the prize destroyed her cherished privacy by turning her into an "official person." According to Jonathan Galassi, editor in chief of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Gordimer's and Walcott's publisher...
...lives in, not this world of endless black victims." But for every pan, Morrison has received a surfeit of paeans: for her lyricism, for her ability to turn the mundane into the magical. In the Nobel sweepstakes at the moment, Morrison looks to be a lot closer to William Faulkner, whom many critics regard as this century's greatest American novelist, than to Buck and Steinbeck...
...they come to pin the blame for this disruption on the strange women in the Convent is a tale of Faulknerian complexity and power. Morrison once wrote a Cornell master's thesis on Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, and the Mississippian's incantatory prose rhythms still crop up in her writing. Here is Deacon musing on the past as he drives around in Ruby: "He [Deacon's grandfather] would have been embarrassed by grandsons who worked twelve hours five days a week instead of the eighteen-to-twenty-hour days Haven people once needed just to keep alive, and who could...
...will lead. The bitterness is the legacy of a violent Southern history in which blacks were victims and when this history is re-enacted, the savage struggle between races is joined but is now more likely to be broken off after a while to share the intimacy of Faulkner's characters...
...College of New York, a free school that had become a kind of immigrant Oxford. He tore through the place--nearly all A's--and finished just shy of summa cum laude. (He totaled his car shortly after getting that news from a dean. "I got a C in Faulkner," he explains today, still annoyed. "My third year speaking English, and I'm reading Faulkner!") But when he graduated in 1960, the New York Times trumpeted the success. His professors knew they'd hear from him again. "I was a little astonished by that kind of ambition," says Morris Kolodney...