Membership Renewal Drive

This summer, as he has worked to update and reorganize our membership rolls, Ted Atkinson, our Secretary-Treasurer, has discovered that a significant number of memberships have lapsed.  Because there is currently no process in place for notifying members when this happens, and because we continue to send out the newsletter and other official WFS correspondence to everyone on the membership list, many of you may believe that your membership is paid up when it has in fact expired.  To address this problem, and with the added goal of increasing Society revenue, we are launching a WFS membership “renewal drive” in the months ahead. 

Here’s how the drive will work.  Over the remainder of the summer, Ted will be contacting lapsed members with an email notice that will include a gentle reminder (or think of it as an invitation) to renew, an embedded link to PayPal for those who prefer to use a credit card, and a ground address for those who would rather renew by sending in a check.  As these renewals come in, Ted will be busy rearranging the membership list chronologically (by date of renewal) rather than alphabetically, which will make it possible for us to notify you automatically in the future when your membership is on the verge of expiring.

In the meantime, let me invite all of you to help out with this effort by encouraging friends and colleagues to renew their memberships, or to join our organization, by clicking on the Membership link at the top of this page.

Faulkner Audio Online

Dr. Stephen Railton has made the archive of Faulkner's recorded readings and discussions at the University of Virginia available online. The site can be found at http://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/.

New Faulkner Source Material Discovered

Faulkner scholars and other students of his work will no doubt be interested in Patricia Cohen's February 10 New York Times article, "Faulkner Link to Plantation Diary Discovered."  The article describes a series of provocative connections, recently unearthed by Professor Sally Wolff-King of Emory University, between Faulkner's fiction and an antebellum plantation journal kept by Francis Terry Leak of Holly Springs, Mississippi.  Professor Wolff-King's research establishes that Faulkner had direct access to this journal through a personal friendship with a Leak family descendant and read copiously in it.  The article is available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/books/11faulkner.html?pagewanted=1

Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference

Faulkner and Film: July 18-22, 2010

“Faulkner and Film” has the distinction of being the first instance in the 37 years of Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha that we have repeated a conference theme. Over twenty years ago, with “Faulkner, Modernism, and Film,” the conference first endeavored to tackle the question of what Faulkner and film have to do with each other—with the broad concept of “modernism” as an assumed common denominator. That the conference is returning to that theme—and to its (now implicit) common denominator—is indicative of major advances both in Faulkner and film studies during the last two decades. The first has to do with our growing awareness of the impact on Faulkner of his experience in Hollywood, especially in the 1930s, and the second, the prodigious attention to film as being in many respects the epitome of what is meant by the concept of modernism.

“Faulkner and Film” will take up the broad areas of Faulkner’s involvement in film—biographically, aesthetically, culturally, financially—and the parallel universes of Faulkner’s fiction and the world of cinema and the ways they may derive from and impose on each other. In the first of these areas, we are looking for discussions of Faulkner in Hollywood: his work as a screen-writer; his work as a novelist while in Hollywood and the impact of that milieu on his fiction; the biography of his life there: the frustrations, the opportunities, the meaning of the distance from Oxford; the film adaptations of his fiction, including the ideological and cultural politics of adaptation.

In the second area, we are looking for investigations of film as a modernist medium and the similarity and difference between the methods of film makers and Faulkner in contributing to that medium. For example, if a fundamental similarity between film and modernist writing is the use of montage, then a major question to raise is how the juxtaposed elements go together in Faulkner and film, how the space and time between acquires meaning, if not resolution. Another question is the relationship between Faulkner and popular culture, and how film, in which that relationship has always been blurred, may illuminate a comparable blurring that Faulkner critics have often missed. And a third: how the adversarial dynamic of a technological breakthrough that may resist the world that has generated that breakthrough compares with the high modernist Faulkner critiquing a culture that, in many ways, he exemplifies.

We are inviting 40-minute plenary papers and 20-minute panel papers. Plenary papers consist of approximately 5,000 words and will appear in the conference volume published by the University Press of Mississippi. Panel papers consist of approximately 2,500 words, and will be considered by the conference program committee for possible expansion and inclusion in the published volume.

For plenary papers the 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style should be used as a guide in preparing manuscripts. Three copies of manuscripts (hard copy only) must be submitted by January 31, 2010. Authors whose papers are selected will receive a waiver of the conference registration fee and lodging at the Inn at Ole Miss from Saturday, July 17 through Thursday, July 22. For short papers, two-page abstracts must be submitted by January 31, 2010, preferably through e-mail attachment. Authors whose papers are selected will receive a reduction of the registration fee to $100. All manuscripts and inquiries should be addressed to Donald Kartiganer, Department of English, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677-1848. Telephone: 662-236-7194, e-mail: dkartiga@olemiss.edu. Decisions for all papers will be made by March 5, 2010.

William Faulkner Society Scholarships

The John W. Hunt Memorial Scholarship and the Faulkner Journal Scholarship

The William Faulkner Society offers scholarships for as many as two graduate students to attend the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference in Oxford , Mississippi .   These awards are funded by generous donations in memory of Faulkner scholar John W. Hunt, author of William Faulkner: Art in Theological Tension, by the Faulkner Journal, and by annual dues from members of the Society.  The scholarships cover the costs of registration for the conference and of the students' choice of an organized day trip during the week.

Graduate students may apply directly for the Hunt / Faulkner Journal Scholarships or be nominated by a faculty member. Each application should include: a letter from the student explaining how the student's work can be enhanced by attending the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference; a current curriculum vitae; and at least one letter of recommendation from a faculty member familiar with the student's work--a letter of nomination satisfies this requirement. Send applications to Jaywatson, President, The Faulkner Society, Department of English, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677-1848 or jwatson@olemiss.edu. Deadline for applications is March 15, 2010.