Thirty–Seventh Annual
Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference
Faulkner and Film • July 18-22, 2010
Call for Papers
“Faulkner and Film” has the distinction of being the first instance in the 37 years of Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha that we have repeated a conference theme. Over twenty years ago, with “Faulkner, Modernism, and Film,” the conference first endeavored to tackle the question of what Faulkner and film have to do with each other—with the broad concept of “modernism” as an assumed common denominator. That the conference is returning to that theme—and to its (now implicit) common denominator—is indicative of major advances both in Faulkner and film studies during the last two decades. The first has to do with our growing awareness of the impact on Faulkner of his experience in Hollywood, especially in the 1930s, and the second, the prodigious attention to film as being in many respects the epitome of what is meant by the concept of modernism.
“Faulkner and Film” will take up the broad areas of Faulkner’s involvement in film—biographically, aesthetically, culturally, financially—and the parallel universes of Faulkner’s fiction and the world of cinema and the ways they may derive from and impose on each other. In the first of these areas, we are looking for discussions of Faulkner in Hollywood: his work as a screen-writer; his work as a novelist while in Hollywood and the impact of that milieu on his fiction; the biography of his life there: the frustrations, the opportunities, the meaning of the distance from Oxford; the film adaptations of his fiction, including the ideological and cultural politics of adaptation.
In the second area, we are looking for investigations of film as a modernist medium and the similarity and difference between the methods of film makers and Faulkner in contributing to that medium. For example, if a fundamental similarity between film and modernist writing is the use of montage, then a major question to raise is how the juxtaposed elements go together in Faulkner and film, how the space and time between acquires meaning, if not resolution. Another question is the relationship between Faulkner and popular culture, and how film, in which that relationship has always been blurred, may illuminate a comparable blurring that Faulkner critics have often missed. And a third: how the adversarial dynamic of a technological breakthrough that may resist the world that has generated that breakthrough compares with the high modernist Faulkner critiquing a culture that, in many ways, he exemplifies.
We are inviting 40-minute plenary papers and 20-minute panel papers. Plenary papers consist of approximately 5,000 words and will appear in the conference volume published by the University Press of Mississippi. Panel papers consist of approximately 2,500 words, and will be considered by the conference program committee for possible expansion and inclusion in the published volume.
For plenary papers the 16th edition of the University of Chicago Manual of Style should be used as a guide in preparing manuscripts. Three copies of manuscripts (hard copy only) must be submitted by January 31, 2010. Authors whose papers are selected will receive a waiver of the conference registration fee and lodging at the Inn at Ole Miss from Saturday, July 17, through Thursday, July 22. For short papers, two-page abstracts must be submitted by January 31, 2010, preferably through e-mail attachment. Authors whose papers are selected will receive a reduction of the registration fee to $100. All manuscripts and inquiries should be addressed to Donald Kartiganer, Department of English, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677-1848. Telephone: 662-236-7194, e-mail: dkartiga@olemiss.edu. Decisions for all papers will be made by March 5, 2010.
36th Annual Conference, Faulkner and Mystery