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/.

Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference

Faulkner's Geographies, July 17-21, 2011

The 37th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference will explore the topic of “Faulkner’s Geographies,” opening outward from the germinal ground of the author’s postage stamp of native soil to consider the myriad means and itineraries by which bodies get around in Yoknapatawpha and beyond.  We welcome submissions that engage with contemporary scholarship in social geography or reflect on the role of spatiality in literature and culture, as a way to illuminate the meaning, organization, and function of space in Faulkner’s work and world.

Topics could include, but are by no means limited to:  the uses of local, regional, national, hemispheric, imperial, colonial, global, or postcolonial topographies as a window onto Faulkner’s writings; the dynamics of country and city, core and periphery, metropolis and hinterland, or simply of place and space, in particular texts or in the Faulkner oeuvre generally; the significance and function of spatial borders or boundaries; mythic geographies of North and South, East and West; the poetics, politics, economics, phenomenology, or psychology of Faulknerian space; actual maps and acts of mapping in the novels and stories; geographies of development (over-, under-, or uneven), of migration, of exile or diaspora; the flow of bodies, persons, or populations through space; and the contours of Yoknapatawpha itself as an imagined geography. 

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. 

This year, as a new feature of the conference, we will also entertain proposals for 20-minute papers or 75-minute panels on the broader topic of “Southern Literary Geographies”—not necessarily limited to Faulkner—for a series of sessions on various aspects of that subject as well.

For plenary papers the 16th edition of the University of 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, 2011. 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 16, through Thursday, July 21. For short papers, two-page abstracts must be submitted by January 31, 2011, preferably through e-mail attachment. Authors whose abstracts 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, 2011.

Call for Papers

Cather and Faulkner at ALA 2011:  A Symposium

The William Faulkner Society and the Willa Cather Foundation are jointly planning a special symposium—“Cather and Faulkner:  Critical Intersections”—at the American Literature Association’s 2011 meeting in Boston, May 26-29, 2011. 

We hope to gather six to nine scholars to present work on the mutually illuminating relations between these two great American modernists.  A formal call for proposals for 20-minute papers will be issued this autumn, with a deadline in early January 2011, but the organizers encourage inquiries and preliminary proposals now.

Proposals might include (but are certainly not limited to)

-- questions of influence, confluence, contemporaneity;
-- comparative analyses of the authors’ in the context of gender, sexuality, region, race, modernity, the environment, material culture, popular culture, geography, etc.;
-- comparative formal or historical analyses.

We will simply be seeking the best and most provocative work that brings Cather and Faulkner, and their readers, into conversation.  We are also eager to learn whether the symposium papers might serve as the foundation for a edited collection on Faulkner and Cather.

The symposium honors Merrill Skaggs, who pioneered this conversation in Axes (2006).

Those interested in suggesting topics or learning more about the symposium planning should contact either John Swift, Department of English, Occidental College (for the Cather Foundation), at swiftj@oxy.edu, or Jay Watson, Department of English, University of Mississippi (for the Faulkner Society) at jwatson@olemiss.edu.

Note:  In addition to the Symposium, the Cather Foundation will sponsor an open-topic panel devoted to “New Directions in Willa Cather Criticism,” as it has done for many years.  A call for papers for this panel will also be issued in fall 2010.  Similarly, the Faulkner Society will sponsor an additional 2011 ALA session on a topic to be announced this fall.

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, 2011.

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 nytimes.com.