William Styron, Sophie's Choice

Pages Agreg-Ink consacrŽes ˆ Styron

 

Biography
+ On the American Collection

 

Awards received:

  • American Academy of Arts and Letters Prix de Rome, 1952, for Lie Down in Darkness
  • LittD., Duke University, 1968
  • Pulitzer Prize, 1968, and Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1970, both for The Confessions of Nat Turner
  • American Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award nominee, both 1980, both for Sophie's Choice
  • Connecticut Arts Award, 1984
  • Cino del Duca prize, 1985
  • LittD., Davidson College (Davidson, North Carolina), 1986
  • Commandeur, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 1987
  • Edward MacDowell Medal, 1988
  • Bobst award, 1989
  • National Magazine award, 1990
  • National Medal of Arts, 1993
  • Medal of Honor, National Arts Club, 1995
  • Common Wealth Award, 1995
  • The Witness to Justice Award, 2002 (read his speech)

     

    Themes:

    • Contemporary Critical Reception
    • The Music in Sophie’s Choice
    •  Life to Fiction: The Real Life Counterparts (Sophie as Composite Character)
    •  The Composition of Sophie’s Choice
    •  Styron’s Reading List of Holocaust Literature
    •  Poland and America, 1943-1947: “Day-to-Day Life”
    •  Literary Echoes: The Reading of Styron, Stingo, and Sophie
    •  The Biblical Allusions in Sophie’s Choice
    •  Styron, 1947-1978: The Gestation Period of the Novel (several parts here,
          including reports on Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, and The
          Confessions of Nat Turner)
    •  Freud in and around New York Circa 1947
    •  Hero With a Thousand Faces: A Mythic Framework for Sophie’s Choice
    •  Literary Influences on Styron

     

    On the Net:

    on Sophie's Choice
    A Chronology of Sophie’s Choice
    Résumé des chapitres

    Essay: Sophie's Choice: Human nature and societal pressure (by Stephanie Beranek)

     

    Styron at work
    "Few American novelists have had so spectacular a debut as William Styron. In 1951, at age twenty-six, Styron published his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, and became a celebrity, a young writer being hailed as a future great. Lie Down in Darkness was soon awarded the Prix de Rome and its artistry led reviewers to compare its young author to Joyce, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and other great modernists. All of these details could lead to the impression that Lie Down in Darkness was an easy success for Styron, but, as the publication of Inheritance of Night: Early Drafts of Lie Down in Darkness shows, the book did not come easily.
    Indeed, readers of Styron's later masterpiece, Sophie's Choice (1979), have long had hints that his first novel was a struggle. On the first page of Sophie's Choice the autobiographical narrator describes his problems with writer's block--problems that have recurred throughout Styron's career--by invoking Gertrude Stein's famous phrase: "I had the syrup, but it wouldn't pour." Inheritance of Night offers readers a more specific account of the young author's struggle with his creative juices, while revealing clues to Styron's keen literary judgment and offering limited insight into his creative process. "
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    Audio interviews: on BBC

     

    About the film adaptation (by Pakula):

    Crazy4cinema

    RottenTomatoes

     

    Künstlerroman (d'après le forum)

    "To some extent, the generic confusion created by Maus may reflect the status of the graphic novel, which developed in the 1980s as a distinct form transcending comic-book conventions and addressing more significant issues than traditional comics; Tabachnick (154-56) argues that the graphic novel presents "a richer sense of time and space and a deeper involvement of the senses than is available from any other novelistic or sequential art medium" and suggests  that there are three different generic narratives woven through Maus:

    The kunstlerroman tradition of the development of the artist, conveyed through the present-day sequences showing Spiegelman dealing with his creative anxieties as he makes the story; (N.B. my emphasis  )
    The bildungsroman tradition of the maturation of the individual, conveyed through the depiction of Art's addressing his relationship with his parents and the effect their survivorship has had on himself; and
    The epic tradition of a hero who passes through enormous dangers, embodied in Vladek's story of survival during the Holocaust." (Canesugar)

    Apport de Dropscone
    " one of the most famous examples of this trend in English is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce (1916), an autobiographical novel where the main character is called Stephen Dedalus. He will reappear later in Ulysses, published in 1922."

    Complément de lectrice

    1) ds A Glossary of Literary Terms de MH. Abrams, voilà ce que l'on nous dit de cette classification, p. 121 :
    Bildungsroman : novel of formation, or novel of education. The subject of these novels is the development of the protagonist's mind and character, as he passes from childhood through varied experiences - and usually through a spiritual crisis - into maturity and the recongition of his identity and role in the world. cf Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage.
    The Künstlerroman ("artist-novel"), which represents the growth of a novelist or other artist into the stage of maturity in which he recognizes his artistic destiny and masters his artistic craft. Instances of this type include some of the major twentieth-century novels : Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .

    2) ds A Dictionary of Literary Terms de JA Cuddon, on ns précise, p 352 :
    Bildungsroman : "formation novel", an "upbringing" or "education" novel. Widely used by German critics, it describes a novel which is an account of the youthful development of the hero or heroine. L'auteur donne comme exemples Dickens's David Copperfield, Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks et, plus récemment, Doris Lessing's Children of violence.
    Il termine en précisant see Künstlerroman, "a novel which shows the development of the artist from childhood to maturity and later."