As we continue to read more deeply in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha world we become increasingly aware of the fullness of it. Figuratively no larger, he would say, than a “postage stamp,” it contains a rich variety of peoples and communities and languages, as well as an equally varied range of environments surrounding them. Central to the fiction are the relationships that exist among these human groups--townspeople and country people, third generation citizens and recent arrivals, Confederate veterans and abolitionists, Euro-Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans--and between them and the built and natural settings within which their individual and collective dramas unfold.

   In short, there is a deep and complex organic connection that obtains within the Yoknapatawpha world, surely one of the reasons why that world has so impressed readers with its authenticity and plausibility. If it did not exist, as the saying goes, someone would have had to invent it. The theme of the 30th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference is “Faulkner and the Ecology of the South.” It will be an attempt to deal directly with that “organic connection” of Yoknapatawpha, to explore the significance of the relations between Faulkner’s diverse communities and the world in which they exist. It is also an attempt to expand the concept of ecocriticism itself: in Lawrence Buell’s terms, “to put ‘green’ and ‘brown’ landscapes, the landscapes of exurbia and industrialization, in conversation with each other.”

   Four scholars appearing at the conference for the first time are Ann Fisher-Wirth, professor of English at the University Mississippi; Keith Marshall, computer graphics designer, art historian, and classical music critic for the New Orleans Times-Picayune; Scott Slovic, professor of literature and environment and director of the Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities at the University of Nevada, Reno; and Cecelia Tichi, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.  

Donald M. Kartiganer

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   Cecelia Tichi            Scott Slovic