Modern Language Association 2009

Faulkner in the 1950s
10:15-11:30 a.m. December 29 in Grand Ballroom Salon J, Philadelphia Marriott
Moderator: Catherine Gunther Kodat, Professor of English, Hamilton College

Caroline Miles, Assistant Professor of English, University of Texas-Pan American, “Faulkner, the 1950s, and the Blue-Collar South”

Joseph Urgo, Professor of English and Dean of Faculty, Hamilton College, “Faulkner's Pedagogy”

Michael Zeitlin, Associate Professor of English, University of British Columbia, "Faulkner and the Crash of the Italian Airliner, December 18, 1954"

Faulkner and the Environment
12:00 noon-1:15 p.m. December 30 in Grand Ballroom Salon I, Philadelphia Marriott
Moderator: Jay Watson, Professor of English, University of Mississippi; President, The William Faulkner Society

Stefan Solomon, Doctoral Candidate in English, University of New South Wales, “By the Rivers of Babylon: Faulkner’s Apocryphal Environment”

Michael Beilfuss, Doctoral Candidate in English, Texas A&M University, “'Use It Well': Progress, Reciprocal Ownership, and the Environment in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses”

Bart H. Welling, Associate Professor of English, University of North Florida, “Green Faulkner or Go Down, Moses ‘Lite’?  Revisualizing Wilderness in Big Woods”

South Atlantic Modern Language Association 2009

The Scrutiny of the Public Eye in the Work of William Faulkner
Panel Presented in Affiliation with the William Faulkner Society
Saturday—2:45 to 4:15 pm Georgia Ballroom East
Chair: Victoria Bryan, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Randall Wilhelm, University of Tennessee, "Framing Difference: Frames and Boundaries in Faulkner’s Fiction"

Rachel Walsh, Stony Brook University, "On Not Uttering Justice: Scenes of Public Mourning and Punishment in Faulkner"

Major Scott Chancellor, University of Mississippi, "Faulkner’s Word and Word in Conflict"

American Literature Association 2009

Topics in Faulkner Studies [Session 12-A]
Friday, May 22 3:30-4:50 p.m.
Organized by the William Faulkner Society
Chair: Jay Watson, University of Mississippi

1. “The Sense of the Middest in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury,” Benjamin D. Hagen, University of Rhode Island

2. “Conceptions of Modernity: Reproductive Rights and Incorporated Rhetoric in As I Lay Dying,” Heather Holcombe, Boston University

3. “Yoknapatawpha's Viewers: Whiteness, Class, and Early Cinema in Faulkner's South,” Peter Lurie, University of Richmond

Business Meeting: Faulkner Society [Session 14-L]
Friday, May 22 5:00-6:20 p.m.

Faulkner and the Metropolis [Session 16-C]
Organized by the William Faulkner Society
Chair: Peter Lurie, University of Richmond

1. “The City Specter: William Faulkner and the Threat of Urban Encroachment,” Anne Hirsch Moffitt, Princeton University

2. "From Kinston to Beale Street: Sounding the Black Metropolis in Faulkner's Sanctuary,” Cheryl Lester, University of Kansas

3. “Faulkner’s Paris: The City Under Siege,” Barbara Ladd, Emory University

Modern Language Association 2008

41. Faulkner and Modernist Studies
3:30–4:45 p.m., Hilton San Francisco
Program arranged by the William Faulkner Society
Presiding:  Peter Lurie, Univ. of Richmond

1. “Faulkner and Modern Criticism: Southern Literature and the Modernist Institutionalization of ‘Difficulty,’” Florence Dore, Kent State Univ., Kent

2. “William Faulkner’s Rural Modernism,” Jolene Hubbs, Stanford Univ.

3. “‘I Look Just like a Kodak Negative’: Callie, Maud, and the Origins of Faulkner’s Racialized Visual Poetics,” Judith L. Sensibar, Arizona State Univ. West

For copies of abstracts, visit faulknersociety.com/index.htm after 10 Dec.

290. Why Faulkner Now?
1:45–3:00 p.m., Hilton San Francisco
Program arranged by the William Faulkner Society
Presiding:  John T. Matthews, Boston Univ.

Speakers:  Hosam Mohamed Aboul-Ela, Univ. of Houston, University Park; Deborah Cohn, Indiana Univ., Bloomington; Richard Godden, Univ. of California, Irvine; Barbara Ladd, Emory Univ.; Harilaos Stecopoulos, Univ. of Iowa

For copies of abstracts, visit faulknersociety.com/index.htm after 10 Dec.

Modern Language Association 2007 

Faulkner and World Cinema
Session sponsored by the William Faulkner Society
Presiding: Peter Lurie, University of Richmond

1. "'Do you know William Faulkner?'  'No, who's he?  Have you slept with him?'": Faulkner, Téchiné and Post-New Wave French Cinema," D. Matthew Ramsey, Salve Regina University

2. "Faulkner in the Light of Mexican Cinema," Jerry W. Carlson, The City College & The Graduate Center (CUNY)

3. "'If It Still is France, It Will Endure': Faulknerian Projections from Hollywood to Stockholm ," Robert A. Jackson, University of Virginia

William Faulkner: Voices from Beyond the United States
Session sponsored by the William Faulkner Society
Presiding: Barbara Ladd, Emory University

1. “Southern Time: Transnationalism and Temporality in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!,” David Watson, Uppsala University

 2. “Faulkner, Фолкнер, Folkner, Fokner: A Case-study of Slavic-Anglophone Translatability,” Sanja Bahun, University of Sheffield

 3. “William Faulkner and the Romanian Readership: A Criticism of Survival,” Ana-Karina Schneider, Lucian Blaga University

American Literature Association 2007

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Session 4-I    New Directions in Faulkner Scholarship
1:00 – 2:20pm
Organized by the William Faulkner Society
Presiding: Doreen Fowler, University of Kansas

1. “Race-ing Toward Manhood in Intruder in the Dust,” Charmaine Eddy, Trent University

2. “Extremities of the Body:  The Anoptic Corporeality of As I Lay Dying,” Erin E. Edwards, University of California , Berkeley

3. “Magazine Culture, American Modernism, and Faulkner’s Aesthete,” Lucas Tromly, University of Manitoba

Friday, May 25, 2007

Session 8-D    The Space(s) of Faulkner’s Pylon:  Politics, Economics, Culture
8:00-9:20 am
Organized by the William Faulkner Society
Presiding: Peter Lurie, University of Richmond

1. “‘They Aint Human Like Us’:  Compromised Bodies and Spatiality in Pylon,” Taylor Hagood, Florida Atlantic University

2. “Pylon and the Rise of Fascism,” Michael Zeitlin, University of British Columbia

3. “‘Flying Low’:  Faulkner and Pylon in the Pulp Milieu,” David M. Earle, Case Western Reserve University

Session 9-M: Business Meeting:  William Faulkner Society
9:30 – 10:50 am

Modern Language Association 2006

Friday, 29 December

471. Faulkner: Reading under Representation
1:45–3:00 p.m., Grand Ballroom Salon L, Philadelphia Marriott
Program arranged by the William Faulkner Society
Presiding: John T. Matthews, Boston Univ.

1. “Performing ‘The South’ in the Canadian Imaginary: Shreve McCannon, Marshall McLuhan, and the Southern Pastoral,” Jade Ferguson , Cornell Univ.

2. “Absence as a Formal Equivalent of Psychic Trauma in Requiem for a Nun,” Dorothy R. Stringer, James Madison Univ.

3. “Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August: History, Fiction, and Politics of Traumatic Form,” Greg Forter, Univ. of South Carolina , Columbia

4. “Faulkner’s Literary Historiography: Color, Photography, and the Accessible Past,” Peter Green Lurie, Univ. of Richmond

Saturday, 30 December

691. Faulkner, Regionalism, and Modernism
12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 404, Philadelphia Marriott
Program arranged by the William Faulkner Society
Presiding: Anne Goodwyn Jones, Univ. of Mississippi

1. “The Modernist Death of Donald Mahon,” David A. Davis, Univ. of North Carolina , Chapel Hill

2. “The Western and the Southern: Faulkner, Genre, and the Crisis of Modernity,” Robert A. Jackson, Univ. of Virginia

3. “The Unconscious and Its Environs,” Leigh Anne Duck, Univ. of Memphis

Respondent: Barbara Ladd, Emory Univ.

American Literature Association 2006

Friday, May 26, 2006

Session 10-G Slow Reading Faulkner
(Pacific Concourse G) 11:00am – 12:20am
Presiding: John T. Matthews, Boston University

1.Deborah Clarke, Penn State University

2.Martin Kreiswirth, University of Western Ontario

And now,” Shreve said, “we’re going to talk about love.” But he didn’t need to say that either, any more than he had needed to specify which he he meant by he, since neither of them had been thinking about anything else; all that had gone before just so much that had to be overpassed and none else present to overpass it but them, as someone always has to rake the leaves up before you can have the bonfire. That was why it did not matter to either of them which one did the talking, since it was not the talking alone which did it, performed and accomplished the overpassing, but some happy marriage of speaking and hearing wherein each before the demand, the requirement, forgave condoned and forgot the faulting of the other—faultings both in the creating of this shade whom they discussed (rather, existed in) and in the hearing and sifting and discarding the false and conserving what seemed true, or fit the preconceived—in order to overpass to love, where there might be paradox and inconsistency but nothing fault nor false. “And now, love. . . .

Absalom, Absalom!: The Corrected Text (Vintage, 1990), p. 253

Saturday, May 27, 2006

Session 19-G The Politics of Faulknerian Form
(Pacific Concourse G) 12:30pm – 1:50pm
Presiding: Anne Goodwyn Jones, Mississippi University for Women

1.“‘In and Of Itself’: Faulkner’s Mules and Southern Singularity,” Cynthia Dobbs, University of the Pacific

2.“‘Go Slow, Now’: Faulkner, Gavin Stevens and the Rhetoric of Race,” Doreen Fowler, University of Kansas

3.“Appalachian Stereotypes and Southern Discomfort: Narrating Ideological Conflicts through the Sutpen Saga,” Jessica Chainer Nowacki, Duquesne University.

Modern Language Association 2005

Thursday, 29 December

366. Queering Faulkner
8:30–9:45 a.m., Carolina, Marriott
Program arranged by the William Faulkner Society
Presiding: Catherine Gunther Kodat, Hamilton College

1. “‘Why Are You So Black?’: Faulkner’s Whiteface Minstrels, Primitivism, and Perversion,” John N. Duvall, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette

2. “Absalom, Absalom! as Queer Christian Conversion Narrative,” Norman Waters Jones, Ohio State Univ., Mansfield

3. “How Shreve Gets in to Quentin’s Pants,” Noel Earl Polk, Mississippi State Univ.

4. “‘All That Glitters’: Reappraising ‘Golden Land,’” D. Matthew Ramsey, Denison Univ.

Respondent: Anne G. Jones, Univ. of Mississippi

Friday, 30 December

765. Faulkner and the Global South
1:45–3:00 p.m., Marriott Balcony B, Marriott
Program arranged by the William Faulkner Society
Presiding: Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, George Washington University

1. “From Revolutionary through Cold War: The Russian Outlanders of Faulkner’s South,” Randy S. Boyagoda, Univ. of Notre Dame

2. “Faulkner and Three Women of the Hispanic Caribbean,” Jerry Wayne Carlson, City Coll., City Univ. of New York

3. “Combating Anti-Americanism during the Cold War: Faulkner, the State Department, and Latin America,” Deborah Cohn, Indiana Univ., Bloomington

4. “Literature, the Market, and the Sanctuary Imperative: Toward an Alternative Genealogy of the Narrative of Faulkner in Latin America,” Sarah Ann Wells, Univ. of California, Berkeley

Respondent: John T. Matthews, Boston Univ.

American Literature Association 2005

Friday, May 27

Session 14-B: Slow Reading Faulkner
Chair: Anne Goodwyn Jones, University of Missouri at Rolla

Each speaker will offer a close reading of a single Faulkner passage chosen by the executive board. The passage chosen is from The Sound and the Fury and appears in Quentin's section (Norton pp. 94-104 and Vintage pp. 186-203). It represents Quentin's uninterrupted memory/imagination of the scene with Caddy at the stream and the fight with Dalton Ames, beginning with "one minute she was standing there the next he was yelling . . . ." and ending with "her blood surged steadily beating and beating against my hand." This passage appears between two scenes late in the section: the "trial" for Quentin's involvement with the little Italian girl and, after the fight with Gerald Bland, Shreve's efforts to help Quentin clean up his blood at the pump. The link provides a bit of the text preceding and following the marked passage as well as the passage itself.

1. Richard Godden, University of Sussex, U. K

2. Candace Waid, University of California at Santa Barbara

3. Philip Weinstein, Swarthmore College

Respondent: Anne Goodwyn Jones, University of Missouri at Rolla

Saturday, May 28

Session 17-F: Faulkner and the Cold War
Chair: John T. Matthews, Boston University

1. "A Quest for Peace: Faulkner's A Fable,” John B. Padgett, Brevard College

2. "`Another Country, Another Front': Race, Transnationalism, and the Cold War in A Fable,” Laura G. Yow, Vassar College

3. "After 50 Years: William Faulkner in Japan in 1955 and the Significance of his Presence in the Cold War Context,” Yuji Kato, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

4. "'Two sisters in sin swapping trade secrets over Coca-Colas in the quiet kitchen': Cold War Containment in Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun,” Tim Caron, California State University, Long Beach

5. "Not 'an American first--he could be an artist first': Faulkner, the Individual Artist Versus the Public Man,” William Moss, Wake Forest University

Respondent: John T. Matthews, Boston University

Modern Language Association 2004

Wednesday, 29 December

411. Faulkner and the 1930s
10:15–11:30 a.m., Independence Ballroom Salon II, Philadelphia Marriott
Program arranged by the William Faulkner Society
Presiding: John T. Matthews, Boston Univ.

1. “‘It Ain’t on a Balance’: As I Lay Dying and the Cultural Politics of the Great Depression,” Ted B. Atkinson, Augusta State Univ.

2. “‘My Son, My Son!’: Paternalism, Haiti, and Early-Twentieth-Century American Imperialism in Absalom, Absalom!,” Sara Elizabeth Gerend, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara

3. “The Poetics of an Economic Transition: A Laborious Reading of ‘The Fire and the Hearth,’” Richard Henry Godden, Univ. of Sussex

Respondent: John T. Matthews Response to "Faulkner and the 1930s"

Thursday, 30 December

688. Fifty Years after A Fable
12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., 410, Philadelphia Marriott
Program arranged by the William Faulkner Society
Presiding: Joseph R. Urgo, Univ. of Mississippi

1. “Politics and Art: Faulkner’s A Fable,” Keen Butterworth, Univ. of South Carolina

2. “A Fable of the Cold War,” David A. Davis, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

3. “Faulkner’s Unread Labor Novel: Displaced Class War and the Heroic Worker in A Fable,” Caroline Miles, Thomas Univ.

4. “Fifty Years after A Fable,” Noel Earl Polk, Mississippi State Univ.

5. “Christ and Tracer Fire / Allegory and Attitude: A Speculative Reading of A Fable,” Theresa M. Towner, Univ. of Texas, Dallas

Respondent: Joseph R. Urgo Response to “Fifty Years After A Fable”