Department or Program
English
Abstract
The sublime, an aesthetic philosophy formulated and popularized by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant in the 18th century, that describes humanity’s rational and emotional relation with their external surroundings, presents itself in William Faulkner’s novels in seemingly evident but startlingly complex ways. Told through multiple generations of families across a small semi-fictional Mississippi locality, Faulkner’s writing dictates a new form of sublimity predicated on collective remembering and multi-perspective storytelling. His characters are haunted by their ancestors and by a racist Southern heritage which has been condemned and rebuked in the novels by the conclusion of the Civil War. Facing both their present and past, these characters gain and lose a sense of temporal and sensorial clarity, autonomy, racial and societal understanding, and ultimately, subjectivity. Then, by casting his characters as narrators and narratees of their own stories, and of their ancestor's stories, Faulkner removes the readerly context by which to understand them under subjective and objective terms and permits a formulation of the sublime not defined by individual experience but instead by collective non-categorical storytelling.
Level of Access
Open Access
First Advisor
Freedman, Sanford
Date of Graduation
5-2026
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Recommended Citation
Karpf, Brett, "“Like My Father Before Me”: Heritage Reincarnated and Sublimity Reformulated in the Works of William Faulkner" (2026). Honors Theses. 541.
https://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses/541
Number of Pages
96
Open Access
Available to all.