7 research outputs found
Panel. Faulkner and Contemporary Haitian Women Writers
For Fear of a Scandal: Sexual Policing and the Preservation of Colonial Relations in William Faulkner and Marie Vieux-Chauvet / Jenna Sciuto, Northeastern UniversityIn the Book of the Dead, the Narrator is the Self: Edwidge Danticat\u27s The Dew Breaker as a Response to William Faulkner\u27s Absalom, Absalom! / Sharron Eve Sarthou, Rust College Identity and Disordered Eating in Light in August and Breath, Eyes, Memory / Carrie Helms Tippen, Texas Christian Universit
Postcolonial Palimpsests: Entwined Colonialisms and the Conflicted Representation of Charles Bon in William Faulknerâs Absalom, Absalom!
This article argues that Charles Bon in William Faulknerâs Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is the embodiment of a fluidity that confronts the efforts to preserve the hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality on which colonialism and neocolonialism depend for coherence and meaning. The biracial, sexually fluid figure of Charles Bon and his contradictory depiction by competing narrators of his tale reveal entwined colonialisms in the US South that complicate the divide between the colonial and neocolonial periods employed in linear surface narratives: Bon is portrayed as living multiple stories of colonialism simultaneously in the novel. With an awareness of the narratorsâ divergent colonial mindsets, we can begin to see the ways in which Faulkner uses Bonâs mĂ©tissage, or blending of cultural, racial, and sexual categories, to confront the resilient colonial mentalities that persist in the twentieth-century American South through imagining an alternative: the acceptance of this fluidity
Digital Yoknapatawpha Update
Box lunch available upon request. Faulknerâs Familial Places: Kinship and Demography in the Digital Yoknapatawpha Database / Johannes Bergers, Ashoka UniversityThe topography of Faulknerâs county is etched with the names of the men and women who made it, from âthe proud fading white plantation namesâ to the âcradle of Varners and ant-heap of the northeast crawl of Snopes.â Using advanced GIS visualizations made with data from the Digital Yoknapatawpha Database, this presentation showcases the spatio-temporal relationships between kinship and demography across Faulknerâs Yoknapatawpha Fictions. Compressing all his fictions onto one map reveals just how consistently Faulkner mapped the spaces of Jefferson county. In particular, it underscores the extent to which kinship patterns are co-extensive with other changing demographic relations. Indeed, kinship appears to function as a synecdoche for larger demographic patterns, and is therefore a crucial intermediary for understanding the relationship between Faulknerâs individuals and their community.Abandoning the Desire for âWholenessâ: Digital Yoknapatawpha and the âCompson Appendixâ / Erin Penner, Asbury UniversityIf Malcolm Cowley curated Yoknapatawpha for readers of The Portable Faulkner, how do current scholars shape the way Faulknerâs work is presented in Digital Yoknapatawpha? Cowley hoped to use The Portable Faulkner to represent Faulknerâs work âas a whole,â but Cowleyâs vision is not that of the editors of Digital Yoknapatawpha, even if they echo his desire to gather the stories of Faulknerâs fictional county in one place. Unlike Cowley, DY makes it difficult to create a view of Yoknapatawpha that comes at the cost of individual Faulkner works. Faulkner stages that very battle in the âCompson Appendixâ; although Jason Compson IV claims a central role in both The Sound and the Fury and the âAppendix,â it is Melissa Meek, a character outside the family, who best captures Faulknerâs âgrowing, changingâ Compson family narrative in the later text. Faulknerâs Families: Digital Yoknapatawpha in the Classroom / Jenna Grace Sciuto, Massachusetts College of Liberal ArtsThis presentation will share practical approaches to engaging with Digital Yoknapatawpha in the classroom to enrich studentsâ experiences with William Faulknerâs novels. I will demonstrate the ways in which my studentsâ understandings of family dynamics across The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses were directly enhanced through work with the character-character graphs of Digital Yoknapatawpha. I consider what is added to studentsâ understandings of the novels through a hybrid assignmentâa short comparative analysis paper requiring students to put two texts in conversation with each other, a novel by Faulkner and a graph or chart from the site. The character graphs can help clarify the reality of relationships or crystalize aspects of family dynamics in the novels, which can then be expanded and developed by students through close textual work
Panel. Comparatively Queer: Sexuality, Identity, and Experimentation in Faulkner and Beyond
Ugly Spirits, Ugly Desires, and the âRoutineâ: Queerness, the Unsightly, and Visibility in Faulknerâs Sanctuary and Burroughsâ Queer / Bernard T. Joy Containing Subversive Gender Identities in Halldor Laxnessâs Salka Valk and Faulknerâs Sanctuary / Jenna Grace Sciuto, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts Gender and Sexuality in William Faulknerâs Light in August and Louise Erdrichâs The Last Report on The Miracles at Little No Horse / Rebecca Nisetich, University of Southern Main
Welcome and Award Presentations
Noel Wilkin, Provost, University of Mississippi and Robyn Tannehill, Mayor of OxfordJohn W. Hunt Scholar presented by Jenna Grace Sciuto, Secretary-Treasurer, William Faulkner SocietyPresentation of Eudora Welty Awards in Creative Writing by Kathryn McKee, UM Center for the Study of Southern Cultur
Welcome, Award Presentations
Ivo Kamps, Chair, UM Department of English, and Jason Bailey, Mayor Pro Tem, City of OxfordJohn W. Hunt Scholar presented by Jenna Grace Sciuto, Secretary-Treasurer, William Faulkner SocietyPresentation of Eudora Welty Awards in Creative Writing by Rebecca Lauck Cleary, UM Center for the Study of Southern Cultur
Panel. Sexual Properties
Percival Brownlee and the McCaslin Ledgers / James B. Carothers, University of Kansasâ[The] anomaly calling itself Percival Brownleeâ first appears in the McCaslin ledgers of Go Down, Moses in March, 1856 when Buck McCaslin notes his purchase of the slave â26yr Old.Cleark @ Bookepper. Bought from N.B. Forest at Cold Water 3 Mar 1856 100 dolars.â The next day Buck frees Brownlee and debits himself the 100 value of the mule Josephine to his brotherâs debit. This part of the Brownlee narrative ends with Buddy explaining to Buck that their father L. Q.C. McCaslin would have renamed Brownlee âSpintrius.âThe âSpintriusâ identification of Brownlee and both early and later descriptions of him support the Digital Yoknapatawpha analysis that Brownlee is ârepeatedly figured as effeminate.â This aspect of Brownleeâs role in Go Down, Moses has been interpreted in a number of ways. This paper considers the possible interpretations of both Buddyâs consistent disparagement of Percival Brownleeâs profound lack of masculine skills, as well as Buckâs stubborn resistance to his brotherâs homophobic disdain for Brownlee, until Josephineâs âBroke Legâ 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 grandfatherâs miscegenation and incest, with their tragic consequences for both free McCaslins and their slaves, of whatever myriad ancestry.âSomething akin to freedomâ: 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. Jacobsâs nineteenth-century narrative is based on her own life in the antebellum South, while Faulknerâs 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 Jacobsâs 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 masterâs control over her body. Reading Faulknerâs work alongside Jacobsâs brings to the fore the southern modernistâs own depictions of resistance. Using examples from his novels, such as defiant individuals and consensual interracial relationships, I argue that Faulknerâs 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 âproperty.â 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 âcitadel of the central I-Am\u27s private own.â 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, âtouchâ the ear of the other, and yet retain its quality as âmine.â This paper argues that, written in the age of voiceâs technological reproducibility, Absalomâs 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 Faulknerâs 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 plantationâs decrepit slave cabin is both a liminal and a queer space. In Requiem for a Nun, Faulkner famously proclaimed that âThe past is never dead. Itâs not even past.â In this paper, I show how the build environment of slavery provides fruitful grounds for identity formation and contestation in Faulknerâs 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 âhusbandsâ with Joe Brown, and it is where the unmarried Lena Grove delivers her baby. A close reading of slaveryâs 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