专八人文知识需知的美国名人--威廉.福克纳

2015-06-03 11:10:49来源：网络

专八人文知识需知的美国名人--威廉.福克纳

　　英语专八人文知识涵盖的知识面较广，考生们需要平时多积累小常识，这样在专八考试中才能游刃有余，新东方在线整理了专八人文知识需知的美国名人系列知识点供考生们参考。

　　威廉•福克纳，美国作家，一生共写了19部长篇小说与近百篇短篇小说，其中15部长篇与绝大多数短篇的故事都发生在约克纳帕塔法县，称为约克纳帕塔法世系。其主要脉络是这个县杰弗逊镇及其郊区的属于不同社会阶层的若干个家族的几代人的故事，时间从1800年起直到第二次世界大战以后。世系中共600多个有名有姓的人物在各个长篇、短篇小说中穿插交替出现。其中最有代表性的作品是《喧哗与骚动》。

　　William Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was aNobel Prize-winning American author. One of the most influential writers of the 20th century, hisreputation is based on his novels, novellas and short stories. He was also a published poet and anoccasional screenwriter.

　　Most of Faulkner's works are set in his native state of Mississippi. He is considered one of the mostimportant Southern writers along with Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor,Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams. While his work was published regularlystarting in the mid 1920s, Faulkner was relatively unknown before receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize inLiterature. Since then, he has often been cited as one of the most important writers in the historyof American literature.

　　Writing

　　From the early 1920s to the outbreak of WWII, when Faulkner left for California, he published 13novels and numerous short stories, the body of work that grounds his reputation and for which hewas awarded the Nobel Prize at the age of 52. This prodigious output, mainly driven by an obscurewriter's need for money, includes his most celebrated novels such as The Sound and the Fury(1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulknerwas also a prolific writer of short stories. His first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includesmany of his most acclaimed (and most frequently anthologized) stories, including "A Rose forEmily", "Red Leaves", "That Evening Sun", and "Dry September". Faulkner set many of his shortstories and novels in Yoknapatawpha County—based on, and nearly geographically identical to,Lafayette County, of which his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi is the county seat.Yoknapatawpha was Faulkner's "postage stamp", and the bulk of work that it represents is widelyconsidered by critics to amount to one of the most monumental fictional creations in the history ofliterature Three novels, The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion, known collectively as the SnopesTrilogy, document the town of Jefferson and its environs as an extended family headed by FlemSnopes insinuates itself into the lives and psyches of the general populace. It is a stage whereinrapaciousness and decay come to the fore in a world where such realities were always present, butnever so compartmentalized and well defined; their sources never so easily identifiable.

　　Additional works include Sanctuary (1931), a sensationalist "pulp fiction"-styled novel,characterized by André Malraux as "the intrusion of Greek tragedy into the detective story." Itsthemes of evil and corruption, bearing Southern Gothic tones, resonate to this day. Requiem for aNun (1951), a play/novel sequel to Sanctuary, is the only play that Faulkner published, except forhis The Marionettes, which he essentially self-published -- in a few hand-written copies -- as a youngman.

　　Faulkner is known for an experimental style with meticulous attention to diction and cadence. Incontrast to the minimalist understatement of his contemporary Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner madefrequent use of "stream of consciousness" in his writing, and wrote often highly emotional, subtle,cerebral, complex, and sometimes Gothic or grotesque stories of a wide variety of charactersincluding former slaves or descendants of slaves, poor white, agrarian, or working-classSoutherners, and Southern aristocrats. In an interview with The Paris Review in 1956, Faulknerremarked, "Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is nomechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow atheory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believesthat nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much headmires the old writer, he wants to beat him." Another esteemed Southern writer, FlanneryO'Connor, stated that, "The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference inwhat the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled onthe same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down."

　　Faulkner also wrote two volumes of poetry which were published in small printings, The MarbleFaun (1924) and A Green Bough (1933), and a collection of crime-fiction short stories, Knight'sGambit (1949).

　　Awards

　　In 1946, Faulkner was one of three finalists for the first Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Award. Hecame in second to Manly Wade Wellman. Faulkner received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature for"his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel." Though he wonthe Nobel prize for 1949, it was not awarded until the 1950 awards banquet, when Faulkner wasawarded the 1949 prize and Bertrand Russell the 1950 prize. He donated a portion of his Nobelwinnings "to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers," eventually resulting inthe PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He donated another portion to a local Oxford bank to establishan account to provide scholarship funds to help educate African-American education majors atnearby Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Faulkner won two Pulitzer Prizes for what areconsidered as his "minor" novels: his 1954 novel A Fable, which took the Pulitzer in 1955, and the1962 novel, The Reivers, which was posthumously awarded the

　　Pulitzer in 1963. He also won two National Book Awards, first for his Collected Stories in 1951 andonce again for his novel A Fable in 1955. On August 3, 1987, the United States Postal Serviceissued a 22-cent postage stamp in his honor.

　　Novels

　　Soldiers' Pay (1926)

　　Father Abraham (written 1926–27, published 1983)

　　Mosquitoes (1927)

　　Sartoris/Flags in the Dust (1929/1973)

　　The Sound and the Fury (1929)

　　As I Lay Dying (1930)

　　Sanctuary (1931)

　　Light in August (1932)

　　Pylon (1935)

　　Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

　　The Unvanquished (1938)