William Faulkner\u27s art of *becoming: A Deleuzean reading

Since the publication of John T. Irwin\u27s Doubling and Incest , psychoanalytic interpretation has held an important place in Faulkner studies. This dissertation provides an alternative perspective on William Faulkner\u27s fictions by\u27 deploying a number of concepts developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, such as becoming, the lines of flight, and schizophrenia as a process. Becoming as a concept that opposes the Cartesian self sheds a new light on Faulkner\u27s characters, who go through the intense experience of becoming-other. Their unconscious is often more social than familial in its formation due to their socio-cultural locations. Despite their temporary escape from their Cartesian selves through becoming-other than who they are, Faulkner\u27s characters completely free themselves from the social codes. In Faulkner\u27s world, however, language often breaks the norms of major language, reveals desires that are prohibited in society, and speaks the words of minorities that cannot be heard in reality. Following an introductory chapter that lays out my theoretical concerns, this dissertation stages a series of Deleuzean readings of four novels that Faulkner wrote in during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Mosquitoes marks a scaffolding in the formation of Faulkner\u27s aesthetics, showing his struggle to distance himself from his former aesthetics and other artists to whom art is nothing but a substitute for a real satisfaction. Faulkner causes the becoming-other of language in As I Lay Dying through Addie\u27s and Darl\u27s agrammatical, asyntactical, apertinent use of language. Addie\u27s foreign language reveals her desire to merge with other beings, and Darl\u27s interior language exemplifies Deleuze-Guattari\u27s concept of schizophrenia in its positive sense. Faulkner catalyzes the unusual encounters between people who belong to different social strata in Sanctuary. In each encounter, the characters momentarily escape their identities. Light in August is a story about a white man\u27s becoming-black despite his white education and white mentality. Joe Christmas\u27s failure in oedipal quests due to his racial indeterminacy shows that his unconscious is socially formed and contaminated with blackness. Faulkner is the artist of becoming; his characters and language constantly mutate and cause the reader\u27s becoming-other