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Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha:
July 24-28, 2005
“Faulkner’s
Inheritance”
As much as the fictional character closest to him–Quentin
Compson–William Faulkner was “an empty hall
echoing with sonorous defeated names . . . a commonwealth
. . . a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking
ghosts.” The names and ghosts, of course, were
not just those of the Old South and the war fought
on its behalf, but the world that grew up in the wake
of their passing: a New South still harboring some
of the values of the Old, a Falkner family history
fostering comparably divided loyalties, a Modernist
revolution in thought and art prepared to challenge
all loyalties, North and South.
The 32nd annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference
will attempt to take the measure of Faulkner’s “inheritance”:
the varied elements that went into his making and the
making of his work. Obviously the range is great. What
events of Southern and North Mississippi history, what
aspects of the personal life, what ideas in the intellectual
ferment of Modernism, figure most strikingly in the
fiction he wrote? What do we as readers most need to
know of the world Faulkner inhabited--political, social,
cultural–in order to best understand that fiction?
In commenting once on his work, he spoke, uncharacteristically,
of “the amazing gift I had,” and wondered “where
it came from . . . why God or gods or whoever it was,
selected me to be the vessel.” The aim of this
conference will be to explore, in somewhat more mundane
terms, “where it came from” and what–given
that “amazing gift”–Faulkner made out
of what he was given.
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