Panel. Daughters and Siblings

Undutiful Daughters: Women and Kinship Beyond Family in Faulkner / Julie Beth Napolin, The New School“It Takes Two People to Make You”: Reading Brotherhood in As I Lay Dying / Josephine Adams, University of VirginiaThis paper addresses the relationship between Vardaman and Darl in As I Lay Dying in order to expose Faulkner’s understanding of the way in which sibling relationships—as opposed to parent-child relationships—can have a profound effect on the younger child’s psychological development. Much of the existing criticism on As I Lay Dying focuses on the Bundren children’s relationship to Addie: how they recognize, comprehend, and confront the loss of their mother. Engaging with the work of John Matthews, Judith Lockyer, and Stephen Ross, I argue that Vardaman creates his identity with and in terms of Darl, and that his interior monologues are a series of desperate, unconscious attempts to fill the void of his now-institutionalized older brother. In other words, Vardaman’s fundamental experience of loss in As I Lay Dying is not Addie’s death, but, rather, Darl’s departure for Jackson.Sibling Psychology and Silences in the Narrative: Racial Memory in The Unvanquished Thomas L. McLaughlin, Jr., Villanova UniversityMy talk argues that Bayard, the narrator of The Unvanquished, possesses a complex racial psychology, especially in how he internalizes his “sibling rivalry” with his enslaved friend and quasi-brother Ringo. Critics have labeled this book a “potboiler,” the bildungsroman aspects juvenile, and the racial psychology generalized and distant; some fault the narrative for failing to encapsulate the Southern reaction to Emancipation. However, the first-person account individualizes the experience of a Southern family left behind by war and faced with the complexities of Emancipation. Faulkner would have been unable to speak to a wider racial consciousness, historically, because of the silences in the archives. Thus, the narrative is not representational but specific, as Bayard is simultaneously both a claimant to and questioner of the Sartoris legacy. This legacy is informed by Bayard’s insecurities about Ringo’s increasingly important role in the family, as well as the ensuing subtle “sibling” power dynamic

Elliptical Sound: Audibility and the Space of Reading

Informed by post-modern scholarship on narrative and voice, the author launches her intentions with the statement that (m)odernist literary production bore witness to new forms and spaces of interracial encounter, most palpable in the acoustical spaces in which voices, sounds and bodies touch. The essay explicates a scene from The Sun Also Rises to discuss aspects of racial identification in relation to works by Jean Toomer and Ralph Ellison

The Acoustics of Narrative Involvement: Modernism, Subjectivity, Voice

The theory and history of the modernist novel traditionally emphasizes a shift away from "telling" towards "showing." This project argues that the overly visual account of modernism misses a crucial opportunity to "hear" modernist narrative and composition. It is an acoustics of modernist narrative backed by two case studies, the work of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner. These writers propose a way of listening to the modernist novel and to the neglected importance of sounds and voices within it. Attending to Conrad's peculiar transnational voice, Faulkner's regional, southern voice, and their shared sensitivity to the physical, rhetorical, and musical properties of speech and writing, I argue that listening in and to their novels takes on a critical valence. In Conrad's negotiation of colonialism and Faulkner's attendance to the legacy of slavery, both writers attend to the dejected registers of narrative voice, hearing the sonic remainders of identity, including race and nationality

Outside In: Chorus and Clearing in the Time of Pandemic and Protest

A sonic ensemble, this essay describes how the COVID-19 pandemic cleared the way for heightened protest against racial violence. Both the pandemic and Black Lives Matter address the acoustical threshold between the inside and outside, being a call to listen rather than simply to hear. Arguing that the call exceeds the confines of the first-person subject, particularly in its chants for justice, the essay moves through auditory fragments of pandemic and protest. These fragments are connected through the fact of air, breathe, and the recognition of a shared world and its chorus

Surface Listening: Free Association and Recitation in the Wooster Group's The B-Side: "Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons" A Record Album Interpretation

This essay is a critical narrative of an experience of listening to the Wooster Group’s The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons” A Record Album Interpretation (2017). The performance is a verbatim recitation of a 1965 ethnographic recording by Bruce Jackson of African American men toasting and singing works songs just before Texas prisons were desegregated. African American actors on stage hear the album through earpieces and re-perform songs and toasts in real time as the LP plays on a turntable visible (but mostly inaudible) to the audience. Their interpretation “transmits” the album to an audience. The essay, continuing that work of transduction, draws from the psychoanalytic notion of “free association” in order to think through the possibilities and limitations of listening across race and gender. It argues that association is a reciprocal way of listening and making theatre. It is also a way of working through history (recorded and unrecorded) in the face of intractable frameworks of racial antagonism in the United States. The essay assembles and “associates” photographs, songs, and excerpts of interviews with the show’s makers, as well as pairing concepts from the literature of listening and the archive of Black sonic performance

Minor Sound: Toward a Philosophy of Circumambience in Faulkner

Julie Beth Napolin, assistant professor of Digital Humanities at Eugene Lang College, the New School, will give a talk entitled “Minor Sound: Toward a Philosophy of Circumambience in Faulkner.” Wednesday, March 4, at 6:00 p.m. in Bishop Hall 209 Professor Napolin, who received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California in 2010, works at the interface of modernist studies, new media studies, sound studies, critical theory, and American literature and music. Her work is included in the essay collections Vibratory Modernism and the forthcoming Fifty Years after Faulkner, and she is currently at work on two book-length studies, The Fact of Resonance: Toward a Literary Sound Studies and Dialectical Sound: Archiving Sonic Memory. Recent conference presentations and articles have focused on the work of Conrad, Faulkner, Du Bois, Eisenstein, and Benjamin. She has also served as associate director of the Digital Yoknapatawpha digital humanities project at the University of Virginia. Many thanks in advance for helping Professor Napolin feel welcome on our campus next month.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/eng_lec/1014/thumbnail.jp

Sound Theory at Grand Theory’s End

Review of Sound Objects. Edited by James A. Steintrager and Rey Chow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 312 pp. ISBN 9781478001454 (paperback)

Panel. Faulkner in Other Media

Loom of her father\u27s dreams: Ruin and Restoration, or Building Faulkner\u27s Literary Place / Edward Clough, University of East AngliaMy PhD thesis examines Faulkner’s use of the Southern plantation mansion as physical space, symbolic site, and literary-linguistic device; this paper looks at those mansions more narrowly, via theories of ruin and restoration. Beginning with an overview that maps their role in Faulkner’s fiction, I offer illustrative case-studies from The Hamlet and The Mansion, centering on Flem Snopes’s social ascent. Drawing out the narrative, material, and philosophical implications of Linda Snopes’s perception of the mansion as “loom of her father’s dreams”, I consider how Faulkner uses mansions to explore Southern power politics and identity politics; to reflect on the dilemmas of cultural historical revisionism; and to explore the role of the Southern ruin in generating literary and socio-cultural narratives. Lending A Voice: Transembodied Media Acoustics in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! / Julie Beth Napolin, Eugene Lang CollegeThis paper argues against the persistent elision of media in Faulkner studies to show that, rather than being absent from Yoknapatawpha, communications technology is ubiquitously present within it. The issue is not the presence of phonography and the radio as motifs or metaphors, but rather the ways of thinking about sound and voice opened up by audio, which I argue Faulkner to have been actively responding to in moments when it appears to be most absent. That absence speaks to the profound force of mediation both to function and dissolve. An account of this physical force contributes to a new reading of voices in Absalom, Absalom!, particularly the voice of Rosa. I ask how the function of Rosa’s voice is to mediate, but also how she thereby articulates Faulkner’s larger philosophy of individual and collective memory. This paper brings not only “old” new media to bear upon Rosa as one of the most poorly understood (and misheard) voices of his body of work, but also the digital archive as it can address our own remembrance and commemoration of the novel at the audible level. The “Gesamtkunstwerk” Connection: Lynd Ward’s Woodcut Illustrations of William Faulkner’s Poem “This Earth” / Erik Redling, Martin Luther Universität WittenbergGuided by the notion of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk,’ Faulkner not only created Art Nouveau illustrations à la Aubrey Beardsley for his early poetry, but also paid careful attention to typography, the color of ink, and the overall design of the covers in order to produce works of art in which all aspects contributed to a rich aesthetic experience. Abandoning this concept in the mid 1920s, Faulkner’s interest in the notion of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ was rekindled when he became aware of Ward’s work in 1932. In this paper, I will explore the similarities between Faulkner’s early poetry and Ward’s woodcut illustrations of Faulkner’s poem “This Earth.

Panel. Sexual Properties

Percival Brownlee and the McCaslin Ledgers / James B. Carothers, University of Kansas“[The] anomaly calling itself Percival Brownlee” first appears in the McCaslin ledgers of Go Down, Moses in March, 1856 when Buck McCaslin notes his purchase of the slave “26yr Old.Cleark @ Bookepper. Bought from N.B. Forest at Cold Water 3 Mar 1856 $265. Dolars” This begins the cryptic account of Buck and Buddy McCaslin’s argument about what to do with “the anomaly.” Brownlee, hired as clerk and bookkeeper, can write his own name, but he cannot read, cannot plough, and cannot lead livestock to the creek to drink except one at a time. Buddy McCaslin immediately judges Brownlee worthless as a slave and urges his twin brother to “get shut of him” but Buck persists in seeking to get his money’s worth out of Brownlee until the latter figures in a livestock disaster: “1 Oct 56 Mule Josephine Broke Leg @ shot Wrong stall wrong niger wrong everything$100 dolars.” The next day Buck frees Brownlee and debits himself the $265, and the following day Buddy adds the$100 value of the mule Josephine to his brother’s debit. This part of the Brownlee narrative ends with Buddy explaining to Buck that their father L. Q.C. McCaslin would have renamed Brownlee “Spintrius.”The “Spintrius” identification of Brownlee and both early and later descriptions of him support the Digital Yoknapatawpha analysis that Brownlee is “repeatedly figured as effeminate.” This aspect of Brownlee’s role in Go Down, Moses has been interpreted in a number of ways. This paper considers the possible interpretations of both Buddy’s consistent disparagement of Percival Brownlee’s profound lack of masculine skills, as well as Buck’s stubborn resistance to his brother’s homophobic disdain for Brownlee, until Josephine’s “Broke Leg” convinces him that Buddy is right. Here and elsewhere in the novlel, Ike McCaslin meditates on both the ostensibly-comic matter of Percival Brownlee and the contrasting matter of his grandfather’s miscegenation and incest, with their tragic consequences for both free McCaslins and their slaves, of whatever myriad ancestry.“Something akin to freedom”: Patterns of Subjection and Resistance in Harriet Jacobs and William Faulkner / Jenna Grace Sciuto, Massachusetts College of Liberal ArtsHarriet Jacobs, a black woman born a slave, inhabits an oppositional social position to William Faulkner, a male descendant of the plantocracy. Jacobs’s nineteenth-century narrative is based on her own life in the antebellum South, while Faulkner’s novels are fictional reconstructions from the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, both writers depict the sexual subjections institutionalized by slavery, as well as challenges to these common dynamics. The textual subversions of Jacobs’s narrative operate simultaneously on the level of form and content, as is revealed through an analysis of her representations of plantation sexuality and her own experiences challenging her master’s control over her body. Reading Faulkner’s work alongside Jacobs’s brings to the fore the southern modernist’s own depictions of resistance. Using examples from his novels, such as defiant individuals and consensual interracial relationships, I argue that Faulkner’s work confronts, rather than passively reinscribes, the patterns of subjection and abuse ubiquitous in earlier eras.The Expropriated Voice: Absalom, Absalom!, Sound Recording, and Enslavement / Julie Napolin, The New SchoolIn Western traditions descended from Plato, the voice is taken to be a form of “property.” The voice cannot be taken from me and is defined as my inmost, intimate self. Faulkner understood that, like the flesh, the voice is a “citadel of the central I-Am\u27s private own.” If, for Faulkner, touch cuts across these fleshly boundaries and privacies, there is already something transgressive and paradoxical about the voice\u27s movement: it must leave me, “touch” the ear of the other, and yet retain its quality as “mine.” This paper argues that, written in the age of voice’s technological reproducibility, Absalom’s mode of narrative voice is premised upon this fragile paradox, expanding it and exerting pressure upon it to near shattering. But what were the limits of Faulkner’s critique of personhood and ownership? Is there something of the novel, as a form, that is premised upon liberal property, personhood, and the voice as belonging?The Slave Cabin as a Liminal Space in Light in August / Rebecca Starr NisetichThis paper explores the imaginative uses of the structure of the slave cabin in Light in August. As I will demonstrate, the Burden plantation’s decrepit slave cabin is both a liminal and a queer space. In Requiem for a Nun, Faulkner famously proclaimed that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In this paper, I show how the build environment of slavery provides fruitful grounds for identity formation and contestation in Faulkner’s oeuvre. In Light in August, the slave cabin is a space where nonconformity can be concealed from the curious eyes of Jeffersonians: it is where Joe Christmas lives as “husbands” with Joe Brown, and it is where the unmarried Lena Grove delivers her baby. A close reading of slavery’s built environment enables us to better understand its peculiar history and legacy in the U.S., as well as its continued ramifications and narrative utility.Response / Erich Nunn, Auburn Universit