The multiple formations of identity in selected texts by William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams
Date
2009-09-18T11:56:26Z
Authors
Malan, Morne
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Abstract
ABSTRACT
This project compares and contrasts the ways in which selected texts by William Faulkner
and Tennessee Williams render their fictional figures as modern subjects engaged in the
complex processes of identity-formation and transformation. These processes are deeply
rooted within the context of the American South. The interrelatedness of identity and
language is explored by investigating how these texts dramatize selfhood not as an essential
or homogenous state, but as a perpetual process of self-fashioning and play amid multiple
positionings. The central hypothesis is that identity manifests itself necessarily and
continuously as a textual discourse in and through language, and that self-fashioning gives
rise to ethical questions, because identity involves not only the subject’s relation to the self,
but also his or her relationships with others in closely interwoven personal, familial and
communal-cultural bonds. This ethical dimension underscores the relational aspects of
selfhood, that is, the notion that the individual is always situated inextricably within the
social, and that the fashioning of the self is thus inconceivable without a consideration of the
other. The following pairs of texts are compared: As I Lay Dying and The Glass Menagerie;
The Sound and the Fury and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof; Light in August and A Streetcar Named
Desire.
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Keywords
identity, selfhood, subjectivity, ethics, self, other, self-fashioning, family, community, culture, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, the South, Southern literature, American literature