A. E. Housman and Faulkner's Nobel Prize Speech: a Note

1971 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-248
Author(s):  
James B. Meriwether

The address which William Faulkner delivered in Stockholm on 10 December 1950, upon being awarded the Nobel Prize, is a challenge to his fellow writers to recall that ‘the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself’ are the true subject of art. The artist who forgets this, Faulkner warned, ‘writes not of love but of lust’ if he does not dedicate himself to ‘the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths’, then his art is ‘ephemeral and doomed’; and the artist himself ‘labors under a curse’.

2015 ◽  
pp. 142-146
Author(s):  
Eoin O'Callaghan

Few authors have had such an impact on the American literary canon as the Southern novelist William Faulkner. His fiction of four decades not only constitutes an extensive exploration of Southern people and their environment, but represents a study of universal human tragedies and moral struggles. The zenith of Faulkner’s career was his receipt, in 1949, of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Faulkner outlined, in his acceptance address, his belief in the endurance of man and the potential of writing to help him prevail. In particular, he advocated a return to what he perceived to be the principal theme of writing: the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself. His receipt of the award was naturally a turning point in his lengthy career. Its prestige and promise of financial security helped to ameliorate his financial struggles and to cement his position as an American master of letters. Some ...


Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 96
Author(s):  
Mats Jansson

This article focusses the reception of William Faulkner in Sweden from the first introduction in 1932 until the Nobel Prize announcement in 1950. Through reviews, introductory articles, book chapters, forewords, and translations, the critical evaluation of Faulkner’s particular brand of modernism is traced and analysed. The analysis takes theoretical support from Hans Robert Jauss’ notion of ‘horizon of expectations’, Gérard Genette’s concept of ‘paratext’, and E.D. Hirsh’s distinction between ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’. To pinpoint the biographical and psychologizing tendency in Swedish criticism, Roland Barthes’s notion of ‘biographeme’ is introduced. The analysis furthermore shows that the critical discussion of Faulkner’s modernism could be ordered along an axis where the basic parameters are form and content, aesthetics and ideology, narrator and author, and writer and reader. The problematics adhering to these fundamental aspects are more or less relevant for the modernist novel in general. Thus, it could be argued that the reception of Faulkner in Sweden and Swedish Faulkner criticism epitomize and highlight the fundamental features pertaining to the notion of ‘modernism’, both with regard to its formal and content-based characteristics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 611
Author(s):  
Xiaojun Bai ◽  
Xiaotong Zhang ◽  
Yihui Li

William Faulkner, once won the Nobel Prize in 1950 presentation speech, is considered as one of the grandest Southern American novelists, because he is seemingly the "unrivaled master of all living British and American novelists". A Rose for Emily is one of Faulkner's most excellent short novels. Besides, the narrative of spaces in this novel is changeable and subtle, and the research on it has always been both difficult and hot. This paper attempts to interpret A Rose for Emily from a narrative style, to explore how Faulkner constructed the narrative of the novel, and then to analyze the characters of Emily in the novel.


Author(s):  
J. M. Coetzee

This chapter focuses on William Faulkner's biographers, including Joseph Blotner, Frederick R. Karl, and Jay Parini. It begins by discussing how a boy of no great intellectual distinction from small-town Mississippi would grow up to be not only a famous writer, celebrated at home and abroad, but one of the most radical innovators in the annals of American fiction. It provides a background on Faulkner's education and how he, in place of schooling, resorted to an intense reading of fin-de-siècle English poetry and of three novelists: Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Joseph Conrad. The chapter also considers Faulkner's short stories and screenplays, his winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949, his views on race, and his marriage to Estelle Oldham. Finally, it looks at the Faulkner biographies written by Blotner. Karl, and Parini.


Author(s):  
Harry Golden

This chapter discusses William Faulkner's influence and popularity, especially among reporters. It suggests that the true test of the influence and genuine popularity of an American writer is whether a newspaper can publish his obituary and offer a literary assessment without hiring a literary expert. Faulkner, it claims, was one of those writers. He commanded the loyalty of a large body of working reporters. Long before he won the Nobel Prize there were newspapermen in Charlotte, North Carolina who considered every book of his an event. There are Southern school boys who write they wished they had died at Gettysburg just as there are Northerners who believe the South is composed of decaying mansions populated by decadent families. The chapter argues that Faulkner played an important role in bridging these conceptions and in a large sense, he can be compared to Charles Dickens.


Author(s):  
Archibald Macleish

This chapter focuses on William Faulkner's acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Stockholm and how he used that moment to speak to younger writers throughout the world, taking the writer's responsibility as the text of his sermon. In his speech, Faulkner began with a definition of the subject—a categorical definition. According to Faulkner, there is only one thing worth writing about: “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.” He went on to relate that election of subject to the tragedy of the time in which he–and each of us also—lives: the tragedy of “a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.” Faulkner spoke at Stockholm not only with eloquence, but with an authority which the men of ten years ago did not begin to possess.


2019 ◽  
pp. 5-12
Author(s):  
Zbigniew Maszewski

William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for the year 1949. He officially received the Prize and delivered his acceptance speech on December 10, 1950. This article re-examines critical responses to the writer’s Nobel Prize address, their interest in the address’s intertextual references to Faulkner’s earlier works and the works of other writers. The language of the address documents significant aspects of Faulkner-the writer’s/Faulkner-the reader’s aesthetic vision from the perspective of his didactic concern with the duties of the writer facing the challenges of his/ her time and as a means of constructing publicly Faulkner’s own literary self-portrait of universal dimensions.


2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-3
Author(s):  
T THUM ◽  
P GALUPPO ◽  
S KNEITZ ◽  
C WOLF ◽  
L VANLAAKE ◽  
...  
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