The critical reception of William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury across time

• Published in: Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brașov. Series IV, Philology, cultural studies Vol. 10; no. 2; pp. 53 - 66
• Main Author: Farkas, Aliz
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Editura Universitatii Transilvania din Brasov 2017; Transilvania University Press
• Subjects: Language and Literature Studies; Studies of Literature; Theory of Literature; aesthetic of reception; William Faulkner; The Sound and the Fury
• ISSN: 2066-768X

The aim of the present paper is to explore the changes that occurred in the critical reception of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which, after a long period of neglect, by now has become his most widely discussed work among literary critics. I will focus on three, historically and geographically distinct moments in the critical history of the novel: its reception at the time of its first publication in 1929 by the American reading public; American literary criticism written in the 1950’s, when more extensive discussions of the work started to appear; and the reception of the novel by the Romanian reading public after 1971, when the Romanian translation was published. Drawing on Hans Robert Jauss’s aesthetic of reception (1970, 1982), I seek to answer two questions with regard to the critical reception of the novel. First, I would like to see whether the literary career of The Sound and the Fury follows the trajectory from initial rejection to wide acceptance with increasing aesthetic value, as predicted by Jauss’s theory. Second, I am interested in finding out whether those features of the novel that were initially perceived as unfamiliar and incomprehensible were indeed incorporated into the later readers’ horizon of expectations, so that they no longer posed problems for later readers.