The multiple formations of identity in selected texts by William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams

摘要

ABSTRACTudThis project compares and contrasts the ways in which selected texts by William Faulknerudand Tennessee Williams render their fictional figures as modern subjects engaged in theudcomplex processes of identity-formation and transformation. These processes are deeplyudrooted within the context of the American South. The interrelatedness of identity andudlanguage is explored by investigating how these texts dramatize selfhood not as an essentialudor homogenous state, but as a perpetual process of self-fashioning and play amid multipleudpositionings. The central hypothesis is that identity manifests itself necessarily andudcontinuously as a textual discourse in and through language, and that self-fashioning givesudrise to ethical questions, because identity involves not only the subject’s relation to the self,udbut also his or her relationships with others in closely interwoven personal, familial andudcommunal-cultural bonds. This ethical dimension underscores the relational aspects ofudselfhood, that is, the notion that the individual is always situated inextricably within theudsocial, and that the fashioning of the self is thus inconceivable without a consideration of theudother. The following pairs of texts are compared: As I Lay Dying and The Glass Menagerie;udThe Sound and the Fury and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof; Light in August and A Streetcar NamedudDesire.