Panel. Faulkner and the Literary Canon

Considering the Unthinkable: The Risks and Rewards of Decanonizing Faulkner / Deborah Clarke, Arizona State UniversityAre we doing Faulkner any favors by canonizing him? To what extent does our belief in his greatness foreclose different ways of reading his work? Do we default to “if Faulkner did it, it must be brilliant,” giving him the benefit of all doubts? I’ll be looking at how our reverence for his work may actually hinder our understanding of it, as well as alienating students and colleagues who don’t dare to admit their resistance and doubt. Rather than using Faulkner’s difficulty as a way to silence critics, let’s consider what happens if we admit that it may be a problem. It’s time to re-think why Faulkner should—or shouldn’t—retain his position atop the American literary canon. Popular Faulkner: Pulp Paperbacks, Oprah’s Book Club, and the Curse of the Hypercanonical / Jaime Harker, University of MississippiBecause of Faulkner’s hypercanonical status—that is, because his writing seems to exemplify the autonomous aesthetic object, placed in opposition to mass culture—decades of brilliant scholarship about Faulkner’s deep and complicated relationship to popular culture have had little effect on the larger direction of Faulkner studies. Building on David Earle’s book Re-Covering Modernism, I suggest that Cold War paperbacks created an egalitarian, diverse reading and writing community that Oprah’s Book Club continued. I conclude by speculating about how a pulp Faulkner canon might construct a new vocabulary for talking about style that articulates multiple interpretive communities and their contingencies of value (in Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s provocative phrase). What happens when we no longer understand popular culture as base source material transformed by genius but as alternate interpretive communities? What if we consider a ‘fertile interchange’ without assuming that our own designations of quality are natural and innate? Benjy Compson\u27s Mind of the South / Mab Segrest, Connecticut CollegeBenjy Compson is more than likely the referent of Faulkner\u27s title for The Sound and the Fury. But a reading of the novel through the lens of southern psychiatric history and my own study of Georgia\u27s mammoth and iconic \u27lunatic asylum\u27\u27/sanitarium/state hospital at Milledgeville reveals the complex signification that results from the family\u27s decision to keep a cognitively disabled son and brother out of the state hospital. What do we learn about Faulkner and about the disciplining of mind in the Jim Crow South from Faulkner\u27s radical decision to write the novel\u27s opening from Benjy\u27s point of view? How do the Compsons’ choices and those of the African Americans who care for them and for Benjy reverberate through The Sound and the Fury and through other southern works, from To Kill a Mockingbird to The Violent Bear It Away to The Member of the Wedding to Streetcar Named Desire

Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change: A Synopsis of Coordinated National Crop Wild Relative Seed Collecting Programs across Five Continents

The Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change Project set out to improve the diversity, quantity, and accessibility of germplasm collections of crop wild relatives (CWR). Between 2013 and 2018, partners in 25 countries, heirs to the globetrotting legacy of Nikolai Vavilov, undertook seed collecting expeditions targeting CWR of 28 crops of global significance for agriculture. Here, we describe the implementation of the 25 national collecting programs and present the key results. A total of 4587 unique seed samples from at least 355 CWR taxa were collected, conserved ex situ, safety duplicated in national and international genebanks, and made available through the Multilateral System (MLS) of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (Plant Treaty). Collections of CWR were made for all 28 targeted crops. Potato and eggplant were the most collected genepools, although the greatest number of primary genepool collections were made for rice. Overall, alfalfa, Bambara groundnut, grass pea and wheat were the genepools for which targets were best achieved. Several of the newly collected samples have already been used in pre-breeding programs to adapt crops to future challenges.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Panel. Faulkner and the Middlebrow

Wild Palms, The Mansion, and Faulkner\u27s Middlebrow Domestic Fiction / Jaime Harker, University of MississippiWilliam Faulkner’s middlebrow aspirations were largely centered on the Saturday Evening Post during the interwar period; unlike many modernist writers, notably F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner did not tap into the lucrative print culture market of women’s magazines. It wasn’t until the Cold War era that he published some pieces in Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle. But as a number of scholars have argued, notably Anne Goodwyn Jones, the conventions of women’s domestic fiction still inform Faulkner’s fiction. This paper analyzes women’s magazines’ culture of letters and places Wild Palms and The Mansion within a tradition of middlebrow domestic fiction.Faulkner and The Saturday Review of Literature / Sarah E. GardnerMy paper examines The Saturday Review of Literature’s discussion of Sanctuary, which included a pre-review editorial, a formal review, letters to the editor, a follow-up 5,000-word essay by a Freudian psychoanalyst, and more letters to the editor. Although the magazine’s founder and editor, Henry Seidel Canby, considered Sanctuary vulgar and obscene, he nonetheless understood that it could not be dismissed. Assuming his middlebrow readers shared his tastes, he supplied scientific as well as literary commentary, thus positioning The Saturday Review as the indispensible guide that would give its readers a critical edge over those confused readers who could only, at best, reach ill-informed conclusions based on literary politics.Middlebrow Patriotism, Neighborly Reading / Yung-Hsing Wu, Seven years after receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Faulkner who had been lauded for a “universal” regionalism became a Cold War Faulkner, tapped by President Dwight Eisenhower to head up the Writers Committee of the People to People program. Materials from the meetings suggest, however, that the writers’ primary identifications were vocational, concomitant with their faith in the literary expression of democracy. While this faith was a good fit for the program’s claim that the “exchange of information and ideas” and “neighborly association” would yield “friendship between peoples,” it also articulated the authors’ view that literature would not only advance a politics, but existed in advance of it