The Sound and the Fury读书报告.doc

Destruction and Renewal -------The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, to a prominent Southern family. A number of his ancestors were involved in the Mexian-American War,the Civil War, and the Reconstruction, and were part of the local railroad industry and the political scene. Faulkner showed signs of artistic talent from a young age, but became bored with his classes and never finished high school. Faulkner grew up in the town of Oxford, Mississippi, and eventually returned there in his later years and purchased his famous estate, Rowan Oak. Oxford was faulkner’s inspiration for the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi, and its surrounding Yoknapatawpha Country. These locales became the setting for a number of his works. Faulkner’s “Yoknapatawpha novels” include the Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942), and they feapure some of the same characters and locations. Faulkner was particularly interested in the decline of the Deep South after the Civil War. Many of his novels explore the deterioration of the Southern aristocracy after the destruction of its wealth and way of life during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Faulkner’s reputation as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century is largely due to his highly experimental style. Faulkner was a pioneer in literary modernism, dramatically diverging from the forms and structures traditionally used in novels before his time. Faulkner often employs stream of consciousness narrative, discards any notion of chronological order, uses multiple narrators, shifts between the present and the past tense, and tends toward impossibly long and complex sentences. For his effort, As I Lay Dying was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. He died in Mississippi in 1962. First published in 1929, the Sound and the Fury is