Faulkner's Southern Literature: Similarities And Differences

This semester, I took two English classes both focused on the South, but each concentrated on two seemingly different versions. The first being the Jim Crow, early twentieth-century South in Major American Authors: William Faulkner with Dr. McKelly, and the second being the modern-day South, specifically works created in the last eight years, in Southern Contemporary with Dr. Nunn. A great deal of history separates these two courses (e.g. the Civil Rights Movement, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Children’s March in Birmingham), yet I noticed similar fundamental themes. Day to day, I observed parallelisms of topics appearing in both discussions: budding female sexuality and its repression, southern identity and race, masculinity and homosexuality,

It’s not even past. Taking a class on William Faulkner simultaneously with a Southern Contemporary class has bettered my understanding of Southern literature as a genre and Faulkner’s present day influence. While there are several influential Southern Gothic authors, Faulkner debatably looms the biggest; he experimented with narrative structures, nontraditional frameworks, symbols, and fictional towns throughout his writing. Faulkner created a literary template for contemporary writers, representing different experiences of different people, in fictional and real places. For example, Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi was home to several of his novels, featuring the voices of poor whites and blacks alike, wealthy, aristocratic families, Native Americans, and interracial couples. Relevant American history largely drove these stories, with his characters’ lives representing the social, racial, and economic ruptures that followed the South’s humiliating loss in the Civil

(1936). Like Linda, the middle Compson brother Quentin leaves the South for an Ivy League school, Harvard. It is true that the Jim Crow-era Mississippi differs from 1970s North Carolina, but they do share a few unlikely similarities. Neither characters seem to dislike the South itself, just the family members, guilt, and memories that live within it. Although Linda does not say it as explicitly as Quentin’s famed final thoughts in Absalom, Absalom! (I don’t. I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!), she is unashamed of her Southern