|
Faulkner and Material Culture
Faulkner
& Yoknapatawpha • July 25-29, 2004
Literature
is inseparable from its cultural contexts. Novels and
poems may aspire to an
original expression, to speak independently of their
time and place, but they necessarily begin within a cultural
network that implicates every word. Scholars and critics
have come to attend closely to these cultural sources,
both “high” and “low,” from lyric
poetry to locker-room limericks, from Old Master paintings
to subway graffiti, from string quartets to rap. Recently,
however, they have learned to recognize another level
of culture, specifically the materially made world in
which we are so embedded as scarcely to recognize it
as a cultural mode. This is the material way of our lives:
our homes, our dress, our transportation, our work, our
sport, our food and drink. None of them is “natural”;
all are constructs that reflect desires, choices, social
attitudes, moral values. They are all the products of
creative power and they exert a great, if at times unnoticed,
influence on our more conscious and deliberate creations.
The world of Faulkner’s fiction is a world of material
abundance, intensified for readers by its relationship
to the real world in which he lived and of which he wrote.
The 31st Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference–“Faulkner
and Material Culture”–will explore for five
days of lectures, panel discussions, tours, and social
gatherings Faulkner’s material world in its fictional
and biographical manifestations. Appearing for the first
time at the conference are several of America’s
leading scholars of material culture: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese,
Eléonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities and
Professor of History at Emory University; T .J. Jackson
Lears, Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers
University, and Miles Orvell, professor of English and
American Studies at Temple University.
Professor Fox-Genovese is the author of Within the
Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old
South, Feminism
without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism, “Feminism
Is Not the Story of My Life”: How the Feminist Elite
Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women, and Women
and the Future of the Family. She is also editor of the
Journal of The Historical Society. Professor Lears is
the author of No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and
the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920, Fables
of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America,
and Something for Nothing: Luck in America. He is also
editor in chief of Raritan Quarterly Review. Professor
Orvell is the author of Invisible Parade: The Fiction
of Flannery O’Connor, The Real Thing: Imitation
and Authenticity in American Culture, After the Machine:
Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries, American
Photography, and John Vachon’s America: Photographs
and Letters from the Depression to World War II.
Also speaking at the conference for the first time are
Charles S. Aiken, professor of geography at the University
of Tennessee, author of The Cotton Plantation
South since the Civil War and a recently completed book-length study, “A
Cosmos of My Own: William Faulkner’s Geography”; Kathryn R. Henninger,
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, who has published essays on Zora Neale
Hurston, Josephine Humphreys, and Faulkner, and has recently completed a book-length
study, “Ordering the Facade: Photography and the Politics of Representation
in Contemporary Southern Women’s Fiction”; and D. Matthew Ramsey, of
Denison University, who has written essays and reviews and has made numerous
conference presentations on Faulkner and films based on Faulkner’s fiction.
Returning to the Faulkner Conference are Kevin Railey, professor and chair of
the Department of English at Buffalo State College, author of Natural Aristocracy:
History, Ideology, and the Production of William Faulkner and essays on literature,
theory, and education and pedagogy; Jay Watson, associate professor of English,
University of Mississippi, author of Forensic Fictions: The Lawyer Figure
in
Faulkner and essays on Faulkner, Freud, legal theory, Lillian Smith, and Erskine
Caldwell; and Patricia Yaeger, professor of English at the University of Michigan
and author of Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women’s Writing,
The Geography of Identity, and Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s
Writing, 1930-1990, and coeditor of Refiguring the Father: New Feminist
Readings
of Patriarchy and Nationalisms and Sexualities.
Among the topics that will be taken up during the conference will be Aiken’s
study of the Old South agrarian infrastructure, within which a large part of
Faulkner’s work is set; Henninger’s analysis of photographs in the
fiction, as a material embodiment of the tension between oral and visual culture
in the South; and Orvell’s focus on the small town in Faulkner–particularly
in the context of contemporary avant-garde negativity toward the town–and
how it served his imaginative purposes. Railey will consider the links between
masculinity and the signs of material culture, such as glass-blowing machines,
cars, and houses; Professor Ramsey will study the film Faulkner worked on, Today
We Live, made from his short story “Turn About”; and Watson will explore
the role of the timer/lumber economy in Light in August. Yaeger will examine
how our reading of Faulkner has been affected by recent African American women
writers’ “rescripting” of his work, and the different material
cultures at work in the process.
Other program events will include discussions by Faulkner friends and family;
sessions on “Teaching Faulkner” directed by James B. Carothers, University
of Kansas, Robert Hamblin, Southeast Missouri State University, and Charles Peek,
University of Nebraska at Kearney; and an exhibition of Faulkner books, manuscripts,
photographs, and memorabilia at the University’s John Davis Williams Library.
The conference will begin on Sunday, July 25, with a reception at the University
Museums and a special presentation–“The William Faulkner Exhibition
and Museum Design Proposal”–that will outline the Museums’ plan
for a new Faulkner wing. The opening lectures of the conference will take place
immediately after in the Ford Center for the Performing Arts, followed by a buffet
supper at Memory House, formerly the home of John Faulkner. A Sunday evening
program, also at the Ford Center, will feature a return engagement of a singer/songwriter
group, Reckon Crew, who will perform a brilliant musical adaptation of Faulkner’s
novel As I Lay Dying. Also on Sunday evening will be the announcement of the
winner of the 15th Faux Faulkner Contest, coordinated by the author’s niece,
Dean Faulkner Wells, and sponsored by Hemispheres Magazine/United Airlines, Yoknapatawpha
Press, and the University of Mississippi.
Other events will include “Faulkner on the Fringe”–an “open-mike” evening
at the Southside Gallery, guided daylong tours of North Mississippi, a picnic
served at Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, and a closing party at the home of
Doctor and Mrs. Beckett Howorth. Films relating to Faulkner’s life and work
will be available during the week. In the Fortune Gallery of the University Museums
Bruce Newman’s photographs of prominent authors, Worth a Thousand Words,
will be on display.
For more information about the conference contact the Office of Outreach and
Continuing Education, Post Office Box 879, The University of Mississippi, University,
MS 38677-0879; telephone 662-915-7283; e-mail: fyconf@olemiss.edu. For information
on the conference program, course credit, and all other inquiries, contact the
Department of English, Box 1848, The University of Mississippi, University, MS
38677-1848; telephone 662-915-7439; e-mail:fyconf@olemiss.edu. For online registration,
visit us on the Web at http://www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner/
For information about participating in the conference through Elderhostel, call
877-426-8056 and refer to the program number 5760, or contact Carolyn Vance Smith
by telephone (866-296-6522) or e-mail: carolyn.smith@colin.edu.
For information about participating in the conference through Interhostel at
Ole Miss, contact the Office of Professional Development and Noncredit Education,
E. F. Yerby Conference Center, Post Office Box 879, The University of Mississippi,
University, MS 38677-0879; call 662-915-7036; or visit our Web site (www.outreach.olemiss.edu).
Donald M. Kartiganer
|
|
Charles S. Aiken
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Miles Orvell
|
