1996 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference

"Faulkner and the Natural World"

July 28-August 2, 1996

The 1996 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference will examine the topic "Faulkner and the Natural World" through six days of lectures and discussions by literary scholars and critics. Among other program events will be dramatic readings from Faulkner's works, discussions by his friends and family, a slide presentation by J. M. Faulkner, sessions on "Teaching Faulkner" conducted by James B. Carothers, University of Kansas; Robert W. Hamblin, Southeast Missouri State University; Arlie Herron, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; and Charles A. Peek, University of Nebraska at Kearney. Exhibitions and films relating to the author's life and work will be available for viewing during the week. Also, the University Press of Mississippi will exhibit Faulkner books published by university presses throughout the United States.

The conference will begin on Sunday, July 28, with a reception at the University Museums for the opening of an exhibition of photographs of the American South by Tom Rankin. Dramatic readings from Faulkner's work will follow in the Education Auditorium. Other events on Sunday will include a buffet supper served at the home of Dr. and Mrs. M. B. Howorth Jr. and a lecture. Tours of North Mississippi are scheduled for Tuesday, and a picnic will be served at Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak, on Wednesday. The conference will end with a reception on Friday evening.

For more information about the 1996 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, write Center for Continuing Studies, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677, or call 601-232-7282.

Speakers

Lawrence Buell, Harvard University; author of Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance; New England and Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance; and The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture.

Mary Jo Dondlinger, author of an M.A. thesis at Arizona State University on Faulkner and forthcoming essays on Dickinson and Faulkner.

David Evans, Rutgers University; doctoral dissertation (1996): "Communities of Confidence: William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition."

Myra Jehlen, Rutgers University; author of Class and Character in Faulkner's South, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent; and The Literatures of Colonization in English (forthcoming).

William Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the acclaimed Albany cycle of novels, including Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn's Book, Very Old Bones, and the recently published The Flaming Corsage.

A. Walton Litz, Princeton University; author of The Art of James Joyce, Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development, and Introspective Voyager: The Poetic Development of Wallace Stevens.

Thomas L. McHaney, Georgia State University; author of William Faulkner's "The Wild Palms": A Study and numerous essays on Faulkner and other Southern writers; coeditor of William Faulkner Manuscripts.

Wiley C. Prewitt Jr., recipient of an M.A. in history from the University of Mississippi in 1991; an enviromental historian who recently completed an exhibition, For the Sake of Future Generations, at the Museum of Natural Science in Jackson, Mississippi.

Diane Roberts, University of Alabama; author of Faulkner and Southern Womanhood and The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region.

Theresa M. Towner, University of Texas at Dallas; author of essays on Faulkner, Toni Morrison, T. S. Eliot, and gender and race.

Jay Watson, University of Mississippi; author of Forensic Fictions: The Lawyer Figure in Faulkner and essays in Southern literature.

Louise Westling, University of Oregon; author of The Evolution of Michael Drayton's "Idea"; Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O Connor; Eudora Welty; and The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction (forthcoming).