"Faulkner and America"--the theme of the 25th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference--is at once an obvious way of approaching the writer and a surprising one, given the kinds of critical attention he has received over the last two and a half decades. In the early years of the conference, as was befitting its title and raison d'etre, the emphasis tended to be on Faulkner the Mississippian and Southerner, the creator of Yoknapatawpha. Moreover, this was an aspect of his life and work that New Criticism, convinced that the best reading of a writer was one that dissociated him from his time and place, had seriously overlooked. More recently, in a series of conferences devoted to ideology, gender, cultural context, and the natural world, the emphasis has been on approaches that might still include the local, while expanding out into larger political and cultural realms, but continued to ignore the distinctively "national" context.

In fact, to some extent there has been a tendency to regard the "American" context as a term and concept calculated to suppress the significance of both the local and the multicultural makeup of the country itself: "American," in other words, as an elitist code of matters exclusively male, white, and Anglo--with a decided bias toward the New England literary tradition--and significantly in opposition to what may be most vital about the country and about Faulkner. The result has been an inclination among Faulkner's best critics to steer clear of the "American" dimension of William Faulkner.

"Faulkner and America," which will take place July 26-31, will be the first Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference to address explicitly that complex connection: how Faulkner and his work "fit" into the various American literary, political, and historical traditions; the degree to which this distinctively Southern writer might be, as an extension of, or contradiction to, his Southernness, an American writer. Among the speakers who will be presenting papers will be James Carothers, University of Kansas, author of William Faulkner's Short Stories; Richard Godden, University of Keele, author of Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South's Long Revolution and Fictions of Capital: The American Novel from James to Mailer; Kathryn Burgess McKee, University of Mississippi, author of essays and papers on such writers as Kaye Gibbons, Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Josephine Humphreys, Bobbie Ann Mason, Sherwood Bonner, and Ellen Glasgow; Peter Nicolaisen, Paedagogische Hochschule, Flenburg, Germany, author of books in German on Edward Taylor, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Jefferson, and Faulkner; Noel Polk, University of Southern Mississippi, author of A Study of William Faulkner's "Requiem for a Nun" and Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner; Hortense Spillers, Cornell University, author of numerous essays on black feminist criticism, including the groundbreaking "Chosen Place, Timeless People: Some Figurations in the New World," "'The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight': In the Time of the Daughters and the Fathers," and "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," and coeditor of Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition; and Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of Hemingway and Faulkner: Inventors/Masters, Dos Passos: Artist as American, Ellen Glasgow: Beyond Convention, Sylvia Plath: A Biography, Telling Women's Lives: The New Biography, and "Favored Strangers": Gertrude Stein and Her Family.

In addition to the formal lectures, there will be a dramatic production by Voices of the South, a two-woman company specializing in "narrative theater": the art of adapting short stories and novels for the stage from the language and images inspired through the text. Alice Berry and Jenny Odle, native Southerners and award-winning actresses, will perform the Joan Williams short story "Twenty Will Not Come Again," which traces the author's long relationship with William Faulkner, and scenes from the novel Light in August.

Other program events will include the presentation of the winners of the ninth Faux Faulkner Contest. The contest, coordinated by the author's niece, Dean Faulkner Wells, is sponsored by Jack Daniels Distillery, Yoknapatawpha Press and its Faulkner Newsletter, and the University of Mississippi. There will also be discussions by Faulkner friends and family, a slide presentation by J. M. Faulkner and Meg Faulkner DuChaine, and sessions on "Teaching Faulkner." 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.

Tours of North Mississippi are scheduled for Tuesday. Sunday there will be a buffet supper served at the home of Dr. and Mrs. M. B. Howorth Jr., and Wednesday a picnic will be served at at Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak. The conference will end on Friday, July 31, with a reception at the home of Mr. and Mrs. M. C. Falkner.

For more information about the conference, contact Charlene Dye at the Institute for Continuing Studies, P.O. Box 879, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677; telephone 601-232-7282; fax 601-232-5138; e-mail cdye@olemiss.edu.

--Donald M. Kartiganer