Bachelor Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, University of Mannheim (Lehrstuhl für Amerikanische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft), language: English, abstract: This paper seeks to explore the social construction of race and how race constitutes identity in "Light in August" by means of historic background. William Faulkner is one of the most popular and influential authors of the 20th century; not without reason has he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. Setting most of his novels' plots in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississipi, he portrays life in the American South and the still lingering aftermaths of the lost Civil War, some of which are: Southern history, climate, geography, natural life, customs, traditions, ideologies, living conditions and speech patterns. In "Light in August", race, like in many of Faulkner's works, is a basic theme. However, in "Light in August", belonging to a certain race is not only part of a person's identity; it is the central framework. Not only is race decisive of how fellow men and women encounter and treat a person but also how this person sees and perceives him- or herself. Hence, identity feeds from race. If there is no clear affiliation to a specific race, identity crisis and a constant search for self can arise as is the case with Joe Christmas in Faulkner's novel. It impacts how Christmas is approached from a very young age by those who know of his black background. Moreover, people change their behavior towards Christmas once they discover that he is partly of African-American origin. The biggest burden for Christmas, though, is how he himself cannot figure out who he is and where his place in Southern society is.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Light in August" by William Faulkner. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Read together, novels from a contemporary world writer (Salman Rushdie) and two modern American authors (Faulkner and Ellision) depict a century-long transformation of how American identity and experience have been conceived and imagined; these changes are revealed in the fiction of encounters between immigrants and natives.

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (FASK Germersheim), course: Seminar, 8 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: 1.Introduction "...Here I am I am tired I am tired of running of having to carry my life like it was a basket of eggs..."(Light in August 255) These are the words of Joe Christmas at the age of thirty-six. They signify tiredness and resignation. Christmas is one of the main characters and a central figure in William Faulkner's Light in August (LIA). What causes this state of fatigue? What makes Joe Christmas give up? This paper deals with several factors that become the trigger for Joe's obvious resignation. Faulkner created a character who mainly suffers from elements like the race issue, womankind, self-destruction and society. These factors belong to a stirring complex of themes which can hardly be separated. Nevertheless, I will work on them separately in this paper in order to illustrate their connections. In Joe's case these factors are not only strongly connected, they even cause each other. All his experiences, his behavior and his environment mold Christmas into an outcast from society and push him into isolation. He becomes a kind of third-rate human being who is not able to leave the vicious circle that captures him until he is killed by Percy Grimm. Christmas embodies a constant struggle for identity which already starts in his early childhood. At the orphanage dark people call him white. On the other hand, white human beings look down on him as a nigger. This period will be dealt with in the following chapter. It introduces most of the topics belonging to Christmas' fate.

Looks at how racial identity is produced in novels by James, Faulkner and Morrison and makes the non-essentialist argument that "race" becomes visible to us through a process of image production and exchange.

Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss. As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own. Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied—and often outweighed—these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.