New Officers Elected
The new slate of officers for 2012-2015 has been elected.
President: Deborah Clarke, Arizona State U
Vice President: Ted Atkinson, Mississippi State U
Secretary-Treasurer: Peter Alan Froehlich, Pennsylvania State U, Hazelton
Representatives at Large: Deborah Cohn, Indiana U; Doreen Fowler, U of Kansas
The transfer of power will take place at the annual WFS business meeting at the American Literature Association convention in San Francisco, Friday, May 25, 2012.
Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference
Fifty Years after Faulkner, July 7-11, 2012
July 6, 2012, will mark the 50th anniversary of the death of William Faulkner. This milestone presents an opportunity to reexamine and perhaps reappraise Faulkner’s life, his work, and his place in U.S., southern, and 20th-century literary studies. The 39th annual Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference welcomes submissions that pursue such reflections, “Fifty Years after Faulkner.”
Topics could include, but are by no means limited to: reassessments of Faulkner’s later writings; new appraisals of Faulkner’s relationship to the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and other midcentury historical, political, and social contexts; examinations of Faulkner’s many “afterlives” in popular, print, and academic cultures between 1962 and 2012; critical reflections on Faulkner’s canonical status in various literatures, or on issues of canonicity with respect to his own oeuvre; excavations or explorations of unsuspected or “other” Faulkners; new approaches to questions of aging and death in Faulkner’s life and works; critical analysis of the scholarly repositionings and reinflections of author, career, and work that have informed Faulkner studies since his death; and reflections on Faulkner’s oeuvre in light of other developments (in the humanities, publishing, education, the archive, or broader social currents) that are shaping the reading, teaching, and scholarly study of literature, a half-century after 1962.
This year, we especially want to 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 words and will appear in the published volume.
Session proposals and panel paper abstracts must be submitted by January 31, 2012, preferably through e-mail attachment. Panelists selected for the conference program will receive a reduction of the registration fee to $100. For plenary papers, three print copies of the manuscript must be submitted by January 31, 2012. Authors whose plenary papers are selected will receive a conference registration waiver and lodging at the Inn at Ole Miss from Friday, July 6, through Wednesday, July 11. 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, 2012.
All conference attendees are encouraged to come to Oxford a day early and join us for a day of free programming on Friday, July 6, 2012, observing the 50th anniversary of Faulkner’s death. Events, all free and open to the public, will include keynote addresses by a major writer and a Faulkner scholar and biographer, a marathon reading of a Faulkner novel at Rowan Oak, a reception and cocktail party on the Oxford Square, and a twilight ceremony at the Faulkner gravesite featuring brief readings and remarks. Make your conference travel and lodging plans accordingly!
Finally, conference attendees may also be interested to know that the University of Mississippi will offer a graduate-level course, ENGL 566, in conjunction with next summer’s conference. The class, which carries three hours of credit, will meet from Monday, July 2, through Friday, July 13, and will incorporate all conference sessions and related events in its schedule of contact hours. Conference registration will be included in the course tuition. Affordable dormitory lodging will be available on the U of M campus. ENGL 566 is intended for teachers and graduate students seeking to enhance the conference experience by deepening their critical, pedagogical, and personal engagement with Faulkner’s writings while also obtaining transferable credit hours for certification or advanced-degree programs. Inquiries about ENGL 566 should be directed to the instructor, Professor Jaime Harker, Department of English, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677-1848. E-mail: jlharker@olemiss.edu.
Call for Papers
William Faulkner Society Sessions, Modern Language Association, Boston, MA, January 2013
Faulkner and Hemingway: Changing the Game: Comparative approaches to the two writers taking the conversation beyond "rivalry." Submissions welcome on modernity, sexuality, gender, genre, transnationalism, the environment, print culture, adaptations. 500-word abstracts by 1 March 2012 to Jay Watson (jwatson@olemiss.edu) and Sara Kosiba (skosiba@troy.edu)
Faulkner’s Publics: Interactions between Faulkner and diverse public constituencies during his lifetime and afterward. Issues of readership, celebrity, the predicament of the public intellectual, and the fraught role of “spokesperson.” 300-500-word abstracts or 20-minute papers to Jay Watson, U of Mississippi (jwatson@olemiss.edu) by 1 March 2012.
Fictions of Power: Faulkner and Energy: How and where does Faulkner engage the energy ecologies of the modern era? What power sources or paradigms “fuel” Yoknapatawpha, and how do they inform its society, culture, and politics? 300-500-word abstracts or 20-minute papers to Jay Watson, U of Mississippi (jwatson@olemiss.edu) by 1 March 2012.
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.
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