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Faulkner's Southern Literature: Similarities And Differences

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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, …show more content…

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 …show more content…

(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

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Some things that made faulkner’s works different from those of O’connor’s are that  Faulkner’s writings are mostly sad and tragic while O’Connor’s are uniquely funny yet ironic, however containing some level of darkness. For example, in O’connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” there is a character named Tom Shiftlet; ironically in this story Tom is a one- armed carpenter which gives the story a humorous feeling opposed to Faulkner’s story of  “Barn Burning” where the father thinks that he can solve all of his problems by burning everything. Another thing that separates these two writers is that most of Faulkner’s stories begin after a major tragedy or a war and O’connor’s works create their own plot as the story grows

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