Call for Papers: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2020

"Faulkner's Modernisms"

July 19–23, 2020

University of Mississippi Announcement and Call For Papers http://www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner

Could anything be more uncontroversial than to identify William Faulkner as a modernist writer? And yet—in a contemporary moment characterized by the renewal, expansion, diversification, and general flourishing of modernist studies scholarship, we can no longer take for granted what that modernism was, is, or might have been, or in what it might have inhered. Where was Faulkner's modernism—amidst what competing or nested geographies of modernity should we locate it? When was that modernism—how should we periodize it? Within or against what temporal scales? Were there specific periods or texts when Faulkner wasn't a modernist, or when he was no longer one, and if so, what exactly was he then, how can we tell, and what might that mean for a better understanding of his work? Which literary, artistic, or intellectual contemporaries, precursors, or successors best illuminate what Faulkner's modernism was, and wasn't? And what new approaches to modernist aesthetics might be generated by taking Faulkner as Exhbit A? What did the modernization process, the modernizing of his various worlds, look like to Faulkner? Sound like? Feel like? And how might the new questions raised, conceptual tools employed, and cultural contexts highlighted by "new modernist studies" scholarship help shed light on these and other issues? The forty-seventh annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference will take up the venerable but also excitingly new question of Faulkner's literary and other modernism(s). Topics might include but are not limited to:

• • Faulkner's place and achievement amidst "high," "middlebrow," "pop," "pulp," "mass," or other print modernisms

• • racial and ethnic modernisms/modernities in, against, or around Faulkner

• • Faulkner's writings as a window onto the modernity of chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation, mass incarceration, and their concomitant modernisms

• • Faulkner's Hollywood work in the context of aesthetic and/or cinematic modernisms

• • Faulkner's creative life and work in the context of "media-made" modernisms

• • Faulkner in light of other material modernities or modernisms

• • modernist perception, the modernized sensorium, and Faulkner

• • epistemologies or ontologies of Faulknerian modernism

• • "melancholy," "sensational" or other affective modernisms in Faulkner

• • the modernization of gender in/and Faulkner; the gender of Faulknerian modernity

• • modernisms, sexualities, Faulkners

• • the modern/modernized/modernist family in Faulkner; modern/ ist childhood, the modern/ist child

• • rural modernization in Faulkner's life and writings; the modernity of Yoknapatawpha County

• • regional, national, transnational, global, or planetary scales of modernity in and around Faulkner's work

• • environmental modernization or "ecological" modernism as a Faulknerian problematic

• • Faulkner's modernism from/in Anthropocene perspective

• • the modernization of politics in Faulkner's life and world

The program committee especially encourages full panel proposals for 60-minute conference sessions. Such proposals should include a one-page overview of the session topic or theme, followed by 400–500-word abstracts for each of the panel papers to be included. We also welcome individually submitted 400–500-word abstracts for 15–20-minute panel papers. Panel papers consist of approximately 2,500 words and will be considered by the conference program committee for possible expansion and inclusion in the conference volume published by the University Press of Mississippi.

Session proposals and panel paper abstracts must be submitted by January 31, 2020, preferably through e-mail attachment. All manuscripts, proposals, abstracts, and inquiries should be addressed to Jay Watson, Department of English, C-135 Bondurant Hall, University of Mississippi, P.O. Box 1848, University, MS 38677–1848. E-mail: jwatson@olemiss.edu. Decisions for all submissions will be made by March 15, 2020.