The William Faulkner Society is sponsoring two panels at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago January 9-12, 2014 We welcome proposals on the following topics.
Faulkner and Women Writers
While much work has been done on Faulkner and Toni Morrison, his relation to other women writers is less well explored. In what ways is our understanding of Faulkner enhanced by reading him in relation to women writers—his predecessors, his contemporaries, and/or his successors? We welcome proposals on all aspects of this topic including, but not restricted to: specific writers, techniques associated with women writers, reception theory, cultural context. Please send 500 word proposals to Deborah.Clarke@asu.edu by March 11.
Faulkner and Disability Studies
One or two page proposals on Faulkner and disability including, but not restricted to: representation of disability, constructions of ableism, applications of disability studies to his work, the intersection of modernism and disability. Please send 500 word proposals to Deborah.Clarke@asu.edu by March 11.
Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas, July 21-25, 2013
A quarter-century ago the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference tackled the issue of “Faulkner and Race.” In 2013, the 40th annual conference seeks to build on and complicate this earlier work by exploring the relationships between Faulkner’s oeuvre and a hemispheric corpus of black writing, with a particular emphasis on African American literature and intellectual production, from slave narrative to the contemporary era of Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, John Edgar Wideman, Maryse Conde, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, David Bradley, Randall Kenan, Edouard Glissant, Erna Brodber, Jesmyn Ward, Edwige Danticat, and so many others. We hope to chart the lines of engagement, dialogue, and reciprocal resonance between Faulkner and this vital body of literature. Who are Faulkner’s most significant black precursors, his formative black literary and cultural influences? Who are his principal black cohorts, national and international? And who are his most formidable black successors and literary heirs? What common problems can we identify in these bodies of work, and what common—or, indeed, instructively divergent—approaches to those problems and strategies (discursive, figural, technical) for dealing with them? How has black literary production in the Americas affected how we read Faulkner’s work today? (How) does Faulkner’s oeuvre pose different challenges, rewards, and threats for black women writers than for their male counterparts—and what about the legacy of black women’s literature for him? How might this sort of comparative inquiry clarify or illuminate the ways in which writers of the Americas grapple with the impact of slavery and the plantation, colonialism, nationalism and empire, racial violence and terror, race-mixing, poverty and underdevelopment, Jim Crow, migration and diaspora, the Civil Rights Movement, and the role of the writer in collective life? How might it honor what Albert Murray identified as the fundamentally miscegenated quality of American (national and hemispheric) literature, culture, and life?
We especially encourage full panel proposals for 75-minute conference sessions. Such proposals should include a one-page overview of the session topic or theme, followed by two-page abstracts for each of the panel papers to be included. We also welcome individually submitted two-page abstracts for 20-minute panel papers and individually submitted manuscripts for 40-minute plenary papers. Panel papers consist of approximately 2,500 words and will be considered by the conference program committee for possible inclusion in the conference volume published by the University Press of Mississippi. Plenary papers, which should be prepared using the 16th edition of the University of Chicago Manual of Style as a guide, consist of approximately 5,000-6,000 words and will appear in the published volume.
Session proposals and panel paper abstracts must be submitted by January 31, 2013, preferably through e-mail attachment. For plenary papers, three print copies of the manuscript must be submitted by January 31, 2013. Authors whose plenary papers are selected for presentation at the conference will receive a conference registration waiver. All manuscripts, proposals, abstracts, and inquiries should be addressed to Jay Watson, Department of English, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677-1848. E-mail: jwatson@olemiss.edu. Decisions for all submissions will be made by March 15, 2013.
