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

Memoir of a Race Traitor

Back in print after more than a decade, the singular chronicle of life at the forefront of antiracist activism, with a new introduction and afterword by the author. In 1994, Mab Segrest first explained how she \u27had become a woman haunted by the dead.\u27 Against a backdrop of nine generations of her family\u27s history, Segrest explored her experiences in the 1980s as a white lesbian organizing against a virulent far-right movement in North Carolina. Memoir of a Race Traitor became a classic text of white antiracist practice. bell hooks called it a \u27courageous and daring [example of] the reality that political solidarity, forged in struggle, can exist across differences.\u27 Adrienne Rich wrote that it was \u27a unique document and thoroughly fascinating.\u27 Juxtaposing childhood memories with contemporary events, Segrest described her journey into the heart of her culture, finally veering from its trajectory of violence toward hope and renewal. Now, amid our current national crisis driven by an increasingly apocalyptic white supremacist movement, Segrest returns with an updated edition of her classic book. With a new introduction and afterword that explore what has transpired with the far right since its publication, the book brings us into the age of Trump--and to what can and must be done. Called \u27a true delight\u27 and a \u27must-read\u27 (Minnesota Review), Memoir of a Race Traitor is an inspiring and politically potent book. With brand-new power and relevance in 2019, this is a book that far transcends its genre. -- Provided by publisher.https://scholar.dominican.edu/cynthia-stokes-brown-books-american-history/1064/thumbnail.jp

The Moore\u27s Ford Lynching Reenactment: Affective Memory And Race Trauma

This essay offers a close reading of the 2008 reenactment of the 1946 Moore\u27s Ford Lynching of four African Americans in Walton County, Georgia. Throughout this fieldwork, we were ethnographically positioned as co-performative witnesses, both a part of and apart from, mirroring the tensions between the intellectual remove of much rhetorical scholarship and the embodied engagement and understanding of performance studies. A complex and sophisticated repertoire of invention shared by the coalition of activists who planned and staged the performance enabled reenactors to mobilize their bodies to construct the ineffability of traumatic memory, challenge official accounts of the lynching, and advocate hope and healing for the future. Through the cross-temporal slippage of reenactment, all in attendance were invited to occupy the subject location of moral witness. A fracture in the coalition along lines of racial privilege/subordination and gender politics revealed the differential reliance upon archival and embodied knowledge, again mirroring the tensions that bind rhetoric and performance