Views on racial categorization in William Faulkner’s and Kathryn Stockett’s novels

ENThe aim of the article is to disclose similar tendencies in the texts by two American authors, William Faulkner and Kathiyn Stockett, for questioning the role of personal trauma and its cause, which lies in the memory of cultural and racial stereotypes. In revisiting two of Faulkner’s novels of the Old South ("The Sound and the Fury" (1929) and "Light in August" (1932)), the authors of the article argue that they display a certain configuration of racial encounters that demonstrate the growing effort of a white, liberal consciousness to understand the racially other. Such narratives, in which black portraiture is central, posit the notion of race as constructed by denouncing the cliches and cultural taboos instrumental in consolidating the white identity, while simultaneously relegating the African-American traumatic experiences to those of marginality or exclusion. Although Kathryn Stockett’s novel "The Help" (2009) represents the same issues, if of a different period, it similarly explores the personal trauma and examines traumatic experience, the cause of which is social marginality. Similarly to William Faulkner’s position, Kathryn Stockett focuses on the understanding of the other. In addition, Stockett employs the memory strategies of transmittance of trauma, which may suggest further problems of transgenerational trauma. These two authors, representatives of different literary periods, in a similar way, but employing different strategies, examine the personal trauma, project it onto a larger historical background and disclose the role of victimization in the personal trauma, which results in the loss of integrity and character of the South. [...].