Faulkner: The Returns of the Text

Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference • July 20–24, 2008

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For a number of years Faulkner criticism, in keeping with literary study generally, has emphasized the significance of various historical and cultural forces as the determining factors of what texts say and how readers interpret them. More recently, there have been signs of a shift re-affirming the formal dimension of literature, the way in which texts assert an original response to culture through their formal qualities. The result has been a fresh attention to the act of reading, that submission to the full complexity of the text that generates what one writer has referred to as “the basic materials that form the subject matter of even the most historical of investigations.” The newer emphasis by no means ignores the cultural context, but instead of approaching the literary text as a reflection, a representation of that context—historical, economic, political, and social —it stresses the role of the text as a challenge to the power of external ideological systems to dictate textual expression.

The enduring (and perhaps prevailing) constant remains the words Faulkner wrote 1919-1962. The 35 th annual Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference, July 20-24, 2008, will explore for five days of lectures and panel discussions how those words have responded to the facts and forces of an evolving world, not so much as reflection or illustration, but as original depiction and interpretation.

Appearing at the conference for the first time will be Martyn Bone, University of Copenhagen, Frank Lentricchia, Duke University, Owen Robinson, University of Essex, and Ethel Young-Minor, University of Mississippi. Returning to the conference are James Carothers, University of Kansas, Thadious Davis, University of Pennsylvania, Arthur Kinney, University of Massachusetts, and Theresa Towner, University of Texas at Dallas. Additional speakers and panelists will be selected from submissions to the “Call for Papers” competition.

Professor Bone, who has written extensively on “place” in Southern writing, will be discussing Faulkner’s “literary geography”: the “text as landscape” and “landscape as text”; Professor Carothers addresses the text “in conflict with itself,” demonstrating how Faulkner’s relationship to past and current cultural conditions proceeds through “mutually negating anecdotes.” Professor Davis’s paper is entitled “Visualizing Light in August,” and will concern itself, among other things, with an intertextual relationship between this novel and Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth.

Professor Kinney, among whose eight Faulkner books is a collection of materials on the Sartoris family, will discuss Flags in the Dust and aristocracy. Professor Lentricchia, a widely published critic, editor, and novelist, will study “April Eighth, 1928,” the final section of The Sound and the Fury. Professor Robinson explores Faulkner’s “textual New Orleans”—his New Orleans fiction, including Mosquitoes and Absalom, Absalom!—while Professor Towner, co-author of Reading Faulkner: Collected Stories, will present “The Weird Stuff:” commentary on some of Faulkner’s lesser-read stories. Professor Young-Minor will examine race and religion in The Sound and the Fury.

More than Faulkner’s published fiction will be on display at “The Returns of the Text.” The Archives and Special Collections section of the John Davis Williams Library will be exhibiting a recent acquisition, the William Bacher/William Faulkner Correspondence, including letters between the Hollywood producer and the author concerning the gestation of the novel A Fable, the outline of which Faulkner wrote on the walls of the “office” at Rowan Oak.

Also on the program will be There will be a special presentation by Willie Faulkner, an African-American from Memphis, who has been studying for years the genealogy of the Faulkner/Falkner family, beginning with its origins in North Carolina.

Other program events will include “Teaching Faulkner,” conducted by James Carothers, University of Kansas, Charles Peek, University of Nebraska at Kearney, Terrell Tebbetts, Lyon College, and Theresa Towner, University of Texas at Dallas, and a discussion of “Collecting Faulkner” by Seth Berner. There will also be guided day-long tours of Northeast Mississippi, including the Delta and Memphis, a picnic served at Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, and “Faulkner on the Fringe”—an “open mike” evening at the Southside Gallery. The conference will begin on Sunday, July 20, with a reception at the University Museum, and a special exhibition entitled “William Chistenberry Site: Possession,” a collection of photographs and drawings of the South . After the Museum reception, the opening papers of the conference will take place at the Johnson Commons Auditorium and will be followed by a buffet supper. A Sunday evening program will feature a video of the late Jimmy Faulkner, William’s nephew, presenting “Knowing William Faulkner,” a lecture/slide show he gave for many years at the conference and at colleges and universities across the nation.

In addition to the regular conference registration fees, we are offering a limited number of waivers of registration for 20 graduate students and junior faculty, to be awarded on a first-come basis. Applications should be sent to Donald Kartiganer, Department of English, University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677-1848, with a letter from the applicant’s department or graduate chair confirming your status.

For more information on the conference contact the Office of Outreach and Continuing Education, Post Office Box 879, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677-0879; telephone 662-915-7283; e-mail: fyconf@olemiss.edu. For information on the conference program, course, credit, and all other inquiries, contact the Department of English, Box 1848, Bondurant Hall, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677-1848; telephone 662-915-7439; e-mail: fyconf@olemiss.edu. For on-line registration, visit us on the Web at http://www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner.