Word: reader
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...opened the Reader's Guide to Shakespeare, by Alfred Harbage, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English. "Here's a new book by a very distinguished Shakespearian scholar and he says simply that no one questions the Shakespearian authorship of any of the plays in the First Folio. The only one he's not sure about is Titus Andronicus; he doesn't think it's good enough. I think he's wrong. It's very clever play--though it's not a pleasant one. But you see, 50 years ago no one would have said that...
...some of them do. Half Brother Lee, the book's lago, lacks the flawed strength required for the role. He is just not very interesting, and when it is revealed that he hates Stamper because he once slept with Lee's mother, the reader does not care enough to believe or disbelieve the gimmick...
...with a blueprint and a program, but as a novelist of "the human heart in conflict with itself"-as he said when he received the No bel Prize. Thus his hopes are implicit in the psychology of the characters he created and in the moral judgments he requires the reader to make. And what he seemed to hope was that out of the heart in conflict, out of the crisis of conscience, could come a new reverence for the land and all its people, and a voluntary recognition by the individual white Southerner of the humanity of the individual Negro...
...Some have found Dilsey heroically simple to the point of sentimental caricature of the "black mammy." Faulkner clearly intended her as a celebration of the quality of Negro endurance that survives with dignity in the Deep South. She is also the book's moral norm, against which the reader measures the decline of the Compsons into drunkenness, hypochondria, idiocy, promiscuity and suicide. Through the three decades spanned by the novel, Dilsey Gibson, with her strength, patience and honesty, is the only one who keeps the family together...
...novels also share another trait that seizes and deeply involves the reader: each is an extended and agonized search for truth. Faulkner at his best thus belongs with novelists like Proust or Dostoevsky. This trait in part explains Faulkner's enormous popularity abroad, particularly in such places as Japan and France, where the state of the soul is considered far more absorbing than sociology-least of all the sociology of a remote region such as the U.S. South. There they have viewed Faulkner's work as a series of morality tales, and long before the U.S. did, they...