1995 Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference: "Faulkner in Cultural Context"

FEW WRITERS have been as committed as William Faulkner to the elaboration and analysis of a single place: in his case the "postage stamp of native soil" that, early in his career, he decided "was worth writing about and that [he] would never live long enough to exhaust." The result, of course, was the world of Yoknapatawpha, the world of the bulk of Faulkner s fiction and the one readers and critics have been studying now for more than half a century. And yet, despite the virtual libraries of prose written about his world, there has been surprisingly little attention to its identity as a complete cultural system: a functioning community of classes, races, and genders, economic, social, and political factors, which can be explored just as we might explore its real-life counterpart the difference being that Faulkner s remains not a collective but an individual creation. His private cosmos may reflect a public one, but obliquely, aslant, the product of a will as well as an observation.

Nevertheless, that cultural system, with its complex connecting points to what was, after all, a real world of "native soil," demands the kind of close attention that we have given for so long to the intricacies of Faulkner s language, narrative form, literary sources, character psychology, and moral stance. Cultural systems real or imaginary can be as complex as High Modernist texts, and one of the major tasks being presently undertaken by scholars is to read them with the intensity, and wide-ranging reference, that they deserve.

"Faulkner in Cultural Context" will assemble a baker s dozen of scholars and writers, from such disciplines as American studies, history, women s studies, cultural studies, and literary history and theory, to present original papers on the cultural context of Yoknapatawpha and its relationship to the "native" one. Speakers will be addressing such issues as Faulkner and the military culture of "The Second 30 Years War," the sources of Faulkner's Southern history, Unionist and Confederate discourse, Faulkner and Southern white masculinity, the conflict of literary and cultural studies, the teaching of Faulkner to Generation X, Faulkner and Frontier Grotesque, "passing" in Light in August, paternalism in Sanctuary, and the filming of Intruder in the Dust.

For more information about the conference, write Ann Abadie at the Center or call 601-232-5993.

Donald Kartiganer

Scheduled Lecturers

SACVAN BERCOVITCH, Harvard University; author of The Puritan Origins of the American Self, The American Jeremiad, and The Office of "The Scarlet Letter. "

DON H. DOYLE, Vanderbilt University; author of New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860-1910 and other studies of Southern history.

PETER ALAN FROEHLICH, University of Mississippi; doctoral student in English.

CHARLES HANNON, University of Alabama; author of essays on William Faulkner and Carson McCullers.

ANNE GOODWYN JONES, University of Florida; author of Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 and the forthcoming study Theory and the Good Old Boys: White Masculinity in the South; coeditor, with Susan Donaldson, of the forthcoming Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts.

CHERYL LESTER, University of Kansas; author of the forthcoming study Faulkner and the Great Migration.

M. GENA MCKINLEY, University of Virginia; doctoral student in English.

JOHN T. MATTHEWS, Boston University; author of The Play of Faulkner's Language and "The Sound and the Fury" : Faulkner and the Lost Cause.

KEVIN RAILEY, Buffalo State College; author of essays on Faulkner and a forthcoming book-length study of ideology and history in Faulkner s fiction.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON, University of Iowa; author of the acclaimed novel Housekeeping and the powerful and controversial study Mother Country.

NEIL SCHMITZ, SUNY at Buffalo; author of Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature.

DAWN TRUARD, University of Akron; editor of The Eye of the Storyteller (essays on Eudora Welty); managing editor of The Faulkner Journal.

WARWICK WADLINGTON, University of Texas; author of The Confidence Game in American Literature, Reading Faulknerian Tragedy, and "As I Lay Dying": Stories Out of Stories.

The 1995 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference poster is funded through a grant by the Oxford Tourism Council. For visitor information, contact Oxford Tourism Council, P.O. Box 965, Oxford, MS 38655; telephone 601-234-4680; fax 601-234-0355. Contents