As befitting a conference theme dedicated to the exploration of new approaches to Faulkner’s fiction, seven of the speakers at “Faulkner in the 21st Century” (July 23-28) will be addressing the conference for the first time. Apparently, even as Faulkner’s work recedes chronologically behind us, it continues to arouse attention and commentary among scholars active today, many of them having turned only recently to the study of Faulkner.

Michael Kreyling, of Vanderbilt University, author most recently of Inventing Southern Literature, will be discussing the question of the representation of Mississippi in Faulkner’s work, in the context of the rapidly changing identity of the state; Walter Benn Michaels, of Johns Hopkins University, author of Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, will take up the novel Light in August and the question of race, which, for all its importance in the past, will continue to be what he terms “The Problem of the 21st Century.”

Three younger scholars--Deborah N. Cohn, of McGill University, author of History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction, Barbara Ladd, of Emory University, author of Nationalism and the Color Line in the Work of George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner, and Annette Trefzer, of the University of Mississippi, editor of Reclaiming Native American Identities--will be discussing topics in Faulkner that have rarely received sufficient attention, such as Faulkner’s impact on Spanish American literature and criticism and, in turn, the impact on Faulkner of what has been called a “creole poetics,” with its emphasis on simultaneity rather than chronology or succession, eruption rather than development, exile rather than origin.

Patrick O’Donnell, of Michigan State University, author or editor of six books on contemporary American fiction, will speak on “Faulkner's Future Tense: A Critique of the Instant and the Continuum,” and Leigh Anne Duck, who recently received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, will explore the relationship between time and the gothic tradition in Faulkner’s work.

Three scholars will be returning to the conference: Robert Hamblin, of Southeast Missouri State University, coeditor of the recently published William Faulkner Encyclopedia, who will discuss the question of the frontier in Faulkner; Theresa Towner, of the University of Texas at Dallas, author of the recently published Faulkner on the Color Line: The Later Novels, who will discuss the concept of authority in fiction and criticism; and Karl F. Zender, of the University of California at Davis, author of The Crossing of the Ways: William Faulkner, the South, and the Modern World, who will offer a revisionary reading of Lucas Beauchamp, of Go Down, Moses, as a comprehensive representation of Southern African American life.

In addition to formal lectures there will be a reading by novelist and short story writer Larry Brown and a showing of Ross Spears’s documentary film, Tell About the South, a history of Southern literature from 1915 to 1940.

Filling out the program will be dramatic readings selected from Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha fiction, “Teaching Faulkner” sessions, panel discussions by Faulkner friends and family. The University's John Davis Williams Library will display Faulkner books, manuscripts, photographs, and memorabilia, and the University Press of Mississippi will exhibit Faulkner books published by university presses throughout the United States. Films relating to the author's life and work will be available for viewing during the week. Photographs of Faulkner and his family will be part of Words and Photographs: Bern and Franke Keating, the summer exhibition at Barnard Observatory Gallery.

Social events will include a picnic at Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, a Sunday buffet at the home of Dr. and Mrs. M. B. Howorth Jr., and a Thursday afternoon party at Will and Patti Lewis’s home, built in 1859 by the founder of Neilson’s department store. Tours of North Mississippi are scheduled for Friday.

For more information about the conference contact the Institute for Continuing Studies, P.O. Box 879, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677-0879; telephone 662-915-7282; fax 662-915-5138, e-mail cstudies@olemiss.edu

Donald Kartiganer