《八月之光》的空间批评解读

《八月之光》以美国南方封闭守旧的杰佛生镇为背景，作为福克纳独创“约克纳帕塔法”世系的坐标因子，该地理空间延续着内战的精神创伤，铺设了种族歧视与迫害的温床。空间批评学聚焦空间的社会文化属性，文学文本空间成为内含多维指涉意义的指示系统。运用列斐伏尔的“空间三元辩证法”，从物理、心理以及社会空间3个层面展开探索，通过主人公乔·克里斯默斯的视角投射出该地理空间下黑白聚居区的冲突与碰撞，个人心理空间中疑似“黑白混血儿”的主体意识的坍塌及白人主导的社会空间对“无身份”种族的围剿。

A Spatial Criticism of Light in August

Faulkner’s full-length novel Light in August is set in Jefferson, an isolated and conservative town back against the American South. As a landmark in the Yoknapatawpha County created by the novelist, this geological space continues the spiritual trauma of the Civil War, providing a breeding ground for racial prejudice and persecution. Spatial criticism focuses on the socio-cultural attributes of space. Literary space, in turn, is regarded as a referential system with multi-dimensional denotations. The paper will adopt Lefebvre’s Spatial Triad to explore the physical, the mental and the social signification of space in the target text. The inquiry of the three will map the geographic space collision between the white and the black inhabitants, the “suspect mulatto’s” collapsing mental space and the suppression of the non-identity race within the white-dominant social space.