William Styron’s "Sophie’s Choice" : can "faults" become assets?

The article examines critical responses to Styron’s controversial novel Sophie’s Choice, and argues that precisely those aspects of the novel that have been the most severely criticized - the sudden changes in narrative technique, the mixing of different genres, the parallels between Poland and America, the comparisons between a slave plantation and a concentration camp, as well as the use of atypical characters – are exactly what makes the novel powerful. Those "faults" serve a universalizing function. The strength of the novel, and its lasting impact, stem from the fact that it is ultimately a moral book

When Love Hurts: Confronting William Styron’s Racial Misery in College Composition Classrooms

Acknowledging and attending to how professors feel about their students is an often ignored but fundamental component in creating relationship-rich pedagogy. This paper references William Styron’s “This Quiet Dust” to facilitate a transparent discussion about how we truly feel about Black Language, its role and use in the academy, and how these feelings ultimately shape how our Black students experience our encounters with them

The 'Color-Line' Criticism: Literary Fiction, Historical Facts, and the Critical Controversies about William Styron’s "The Confessions of Nat Turner"

This article analyses critical responses to William Styron’s "The Confessions of Nat Turner", claiming that the reception of the novel was strongly determined by the question of race and the different perception-and-interpretation of a “common” history by black and white Americans. I demonstrate that the polemics about Styron’s novel resulted not only from an entirely different understanding by white and black critics of the question as to what literature is essentially and what social role it has to perform, but also from the incompatible implementation of historiography, in the realm of which both sides placed the novel. I argue that, as a result, the critical controversies about "The Confessions" were drawn along the so-called “color line”, a category which traditionally defined Americans according to their [email protected] Kamionowski is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Modern Languages at the University of Bialystok, Poland. He is the author of two books: "Głosy z “dzikiej strefy” (Voices from the “wild zone”) (2011) on the poetry of Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and Audre Lorde, and" New Wine in Old Bottles". "Angela Carter’s Fiction" (2000). He has published articles on women and African American writers and postmodernist novelists. He has also co-edited three volumes of critical essays on American women poets: "Piękniejszy dom od Prozy" (A Fairer House than Prose) (2005), "O wiele więcej Okien" (More numerous of Windows) (2008), and "Drzwi szerzej Otworzyć" (Superior – for Doors) (2011).University of Bialystok7 (4/2014)132

In Hawthorne\u27s Shadow: American Romance from Melville to Mailer

“The world is so sad and solemn,” wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne, “that things meant in jest are liable, by an overwhelming influence, to become dreadful earnest; gaily dressed fantasies turning to ghostly and black-clad images of themselves.” From the radical dualism of Hawthorne’s vision, Samuel Coale argues, springs a continuing tradition in the American novel. In Hawthorne’s Shadow is the first critical study to describe precisely the formal shape of Hawthorne’s psychological romance and to explore his themes and images in relation to such contemporary writers as John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, John Gardner, Joyce Carol Oates, William Styron, and John Updike. When viewed from this perspective, certain writers—particularly Cheever, Mailer, Oates, and Gardner—appear in a new and very different light, leading to a considerable reevaluation of their achievement and their place in American fiction. Mr. Coale’s long interviews and conversations with John Cheever, John Gardner, William Styron, and others have provided insights and perspectives that make this book particularly valuable to students of contemporary American literature. Coale links contemporary writers to an on-going American romantic tradition, represented by such earlier authors as Melville, Harold Frederic, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers. He explores the distinctly Manichean matter of much American romance, linking it to America’s Puritan past and to the almost schizophrenic dynamics of American culture in general. Finally, he reexamines the post-modernist writers in light of Hawthorne’s “shadow” and shows that, however similar they may be in some ways, they differ remarkably from the previous American romantic tradition. Samuel Coale, professor of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, is the author of John Cheever and Anthony Burgess.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/1021/thumbnail.jp

The Scandal of Jewish Rage in William Styron\u27s \u3ci\u3eSophie\u27s Choice\u3c/i\u3e

Scholars have suggested that William Styron’s Nathan in Sophie’s Choice is insane or depraved—a character whose motivations lack rationality at best and are unambiguously evil at worst. Elie Wiesel, the author of the famous Holocaust memoir Night, has been very critical of Styron’s novel. Ironically, by using the Yiddish version of Wiesel’s memoir Night, it is possible to demonstrate that Nathan’s behavior is more “logical” than scholars have previously understood. This approach offers us a new way of reading and interpreting Styron’s novel by clarifying how Nathan’s character functions within a well-established tradition of sociopolitical outrage about racial oppression, which is best exemplified in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, a text that Styron strategically references in Sophie’s Choice

Jamesian echoes in William Styron\u27s Set This House on Fire

Critics have noticed in Set This House on Fire the influence, in style, subject matter, and philosophy of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Camus, Kierkegaard, Tillich, and the classical tragic hero. There has been almost no mention of the influence of Henry James, This thesis explores the use of Jamesian themes and narrative techniques in Set This House On Fire, with particular attention paid to Peter Leverett as a model of James\u27s unreliable narrator