Approaching a stylistics of modernism: History as haunting in the novels of Woolf, Faulkner and Morrison

This dissertation considers the political aspects of "haunting," an effect of the defamiliarized narrative styles used by Woolf, Faulkner and Morrison. In a defamiliarized narrative, omissions and surpluses in the text leave the reader with a sense that no complete story can be reconstructed from the information provided. "Haunting" emerges from the inability to adequately place all of the information provided. Used to emphasize specific readings of history, "haunting" can be a powerful method of politicizing a text.;Narrative techniques which produce "haunting" are frequently used by critics to justify readings which modify the original non-linear, fragmented narrative structure, producing a straightforward, "accessible" narrative form. However, these attempts to clarify highly politicized texts create a critical bias. Eliminating gaps and discrepancies in the text removes much of the "haunting" effect of defamiliarized narrative.;The dissertation begins with Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and the ways in which it forces the reader to question prevalent notions of patriarchally constructed history. Mrs Dalloway is not an imitation of Joyce's Ulysses, as many have argued, but a feminist revision. As such, it makes a strong statement about the connection between modern fiction and patriarchal narratives. Also important to the discussion of Woolf is her use of a feminist stylistics which resembles that of George Eliot and Aphra Behn. The dissertation then considers the "haunting" effect as it occurs in the fiction of William Faulkner, which contains what one critic has called "discrepancies and contradictions." Two novels in particular which contain a number of discrepancies are Go Down, Moses and Absalom, Absalom! In both novels these defamiliarizing aspects of the text have specific identifiable effects on the reader, and help to create a view of history which is in many ways contradictory to the historical perspective which emanates from a plot-centered reading of the novels. The dissertation closes with a consideration of Toni Morrison's Beloved as it relates to canonical texts and traditional reading methods, arguing that the theme and narrative techniques used in Beloved combine to alter the reader's conception of the works of numerous canonical figures in American literature.