A Stylistic Analysis Of A Rose For Emily By William Faulkner

Born in the early20th century and flourished in the sixties and seventies,stylistics is continuing to achieve new progress in the new century. Literary Stylisticsis designed to study distinctive artistic features in literary creation, to interpretlanguage in literature from multi-angle appreciation, and to explore the stylisticeffects. Stylistics serves strong guidance and inspiration to readers, to the effect ofenlightening and interaction. This research is mainly about the literary stylisticfeatures of an American novel A Rose for Emily.William Faulkner, being a prominent writer in one20th century’s Americanliterature, gains his worldwide popularity for the unique style of his novel, having apositive and profound impact on the development of American literature. Alan Tate inthe mid-20th century, said even if we say that even in the absence of Shakespeare, theElizabethan age were still a peak in the English literature, so would be Faulkner thenew outstanding and brilliant literature of the South. Faulkner’s status in the modernAmerican literature can be compared with Shakespeare, we can see Faulkner’s literaryachievements and social reputation.Faulkner is a productive writer, producing a great variety of marvelous shortstories as well as his Nobel Literature Award Winner—The Sound and Fury. His moststories set in the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, which portraits economicdepression, family degradation, spiritual loss and chain on minds, and among them ARose for Emily is a masterpiece. Emily is typical of those in Faulkner’sYoknapatwapha stories who are the symbols of the Old South but the prisoners of thepast, lost in sadness. Eventually, she cannot escape the prison built by her father andherself, let alone its lifelong influence. Living isolated and deprived ofcommunication with others, she was accompanied by a corpse until her death. We dofeel sorry for her, who is merely a representative of a bygone era, leaving a sigh forthe South. Various literary critical analyses on the short story have been made fromdifferent perspectives; however, there is no complete and thorough analysis on it fromthe perspective of stylistics. Therefore, it is a necessity to apply stylistics into thestylistic analysis of the short story. This thesis consists of an introduction, the main body and a conclusion. Its maincontents are as follows:The first part is introduction, which mainly makes a brief summary of theprevious research of stylistics and A Rose for Emily, and then points out the greatsignificance of the analysis on the short novel from a stylistic point of view.The second part is the main body, which is made up of four chapters:Chapter One mainly introduces some influential previous researches on style,stylistics. Historically different scholars have made wide and profound study intostyle and stylistics, thus various definitions have been claimed. With somereprehensive definitions employed in the thesis, the paper focuses the literarystylistics. It gives a brief description of the major levels of stylistics analysis, namelyphonological level, lexical level and syntactic level and cohesion and stylisticapproach as well as narrative structure; as for the syntactic level, the stylistic featureslie in the combination of both long and short sentences as well as the employment ofperiodical sentences; in addition, the story is highly cohesive.Chapter Two first carries out a comprehensive stylistic analysis of this story. Thestudy delves on the phonological level, lexical level and syntactic level and cohesionrespectively. A fuller appreciation of this story from stylistic perspective is ultimatelyachieved. On phonological level, such devices as alliteration, phonetic repetitions,polysyndeton and other sound effects; on the lexical level, the simple daily words andlocal color find great expression in the story, with onomatopoeic words contributingto the artistic features of the story.Chapter Three focuses on its narrative features. Anachronies, the ambiguity of thereference of pronouns and the multi-angles narration give expression to Faulkner’sextraordinary and flexible skills. Its narrative time and story time demonstrateGenett’s embedded theory, showing the structure of Chinese word of “hui”; thechange in narrative angle and the employment of teller-character andreflector-character in turn result in the ambiguity of the reference of pronouns; as wellas the implied narrator lead to the anonymous voice.The last part is conclusion, which is designed to summarize the previous study,and points out the main purpose of this thesis. This research has analyzed A Rose for Emily’s style of writing at several levels. As we can see, A Rose for Emily as a classicliterary works deserves its fame, with its own unique language style and narrativetechnique. Using the literary stylistic approach to analyze A Rose for Emily byWilliam Faulkner, we readers can tell the author’s style about his words, phrases,sentences and the story as a whole to the effect of a better understanding andappreciation of the masterpiece—A Rose for Emily.