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William Faulkner's The Town, Psychoanalysis and the Reassessment of Lack

Jung, Daae
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1302540901

Abstract Details

2011, MA, Kent State University, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English.
This thesis explores William Faulkner’s The Town through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. In The Town, Faulkner presents the Southern history as a traumatic structure and examines the possibility of healing the trauma. In casting doubt on the interpretation that Faulkner allegorizes the Snopes as the ‘pure evil’ by depicting this family of characters as destroying the traditional virtue of the South, I argue that the ‘anti-Snopesism’ of the novel, as represented by, among others, the narrator Gavin Stevens, functions as a way to maintain the ideological fantasy of a ‘Good Jefferson’ as an ideal community. Faulkner’s novel, I argue, makes this explicit. As I demonstrate, this ‘anti-Snopesism’ is symptomatic of ‘the Snopes effect’ by which I mean to show how the very act of demonizing the Snopes tends to neglect a complex class struggle implicit in the novel and impute all the negative consequences to the Snopes. I examine this major interpretive point by drawing on psychoanalytic notions of lack and loss which I respectively equal to structural trauma and historical trauma. The narrator’s misperception of the state of affairs in Jefferson essentially derives from being confused about structural trauma and historical trauma, reducing the former to the latter.
Tammy Clewell (Advisor)
Vera Camden (Committee Member)
Kevin Floyd (Committee Member)
60 p.
American Literature
William Faulkner; The Town; psychoanalysis; trauma; lack

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Jung, D. (2011). William Faulkner's The Town, Psychoanalysis and the Reassessment of Lack [Master's thesis, Kent State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1302540901

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Jung, Daae. William Faulkner's The Town, Psychoanalysis and the Reassessment of Lack. 2011. Kent State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1302540901.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Jung, Daae. "William Faulkner's The Town, Psychoanalysis and the Reassessment of Lack." Master's thesis, Kent State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1302540901

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

kent1302540901
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© 2011, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Kent State University and OhioLINK.