the
Southern Register g
THE NEWSLETTER OF THE
CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SOUTHERN CULTURE • SPRING/SUMMER 2005
THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI
Faulkner’s Inheritance Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference July 24-28, 2005
I
n a sense Faulkner’s “inheritance” was the standard turn-of-the-century Southern condition, what Allen Tate years later referred to as the “double focus, a looking two ways.” One of those ways was backward to the antebellum culture and the War between the States that was fought to defend it; the other was toward the present, modern world, with all its implicit and explicit challenges to much of what the Old South had stood for, good and bad. Mrs. L. H. Harris, writing in 1906, put it more poetically. Every Southerner, especially the white males, had to assume two roles simultaneously: to be “himself and his favorite forefather at the same time,” to inhabit “two characters . . . one which condemns us, more or less downtrodden by facts, to the days of our own years, and one in which we tread a perpetual minuet of past glories.” The 32nd annual Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference will explore for five days some of the complexities of that “double focus,” the way in which Faulkner’s general Southern, as well as his distinctive “Falkner,” past and present come together in his fiction. His own “looking two ways” meant a continuous staging of fictional meetings between what constituted his background and the new conditions upon which he brought that background to bear. Among the questions that conference speakers will be raising are What is the nature of the relationships Faulkner had with his mother, Maud Butler Falkner, the “white maternal,” and with Caroline Barr, the “black maternal”? How does the “culture of segregation,” within which Faulkner spent virtually all his life, figure in his fiction? What is the place of one of the major Southern cultural contributions–the blues–in Faulkner’s work? How does Faulkner’s passion for innovation square with the very idea of “inheritance”?
The Square, by John McCrady (1911-1968), illustrates the 2005 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference poster and program courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. William Lewis and the Downtown Grill. Flat copies of the poster and two others with McCrady paintings, Political Rally and Oxford on a Hill, are available for $10.00 each plus $3.50 postage and handling. Mississippi residents should add 7 percent sales tax. Send all orders to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture with a check, made payable to The University of Mississippi, or with a Visa or MasterCard account number and expiration dates. Credit card orders also may be made by calling 800-390-3527.
These and other issues will be taken up by Judith L. Sensibar, Susan Donaldson, Adam Gussow, Noel Polk, Martin Kreiswirth, Jon Smith, Priscilla Wald, and Lael Gold. Jay Parini, author of the recent widely acclaimed biography of (continued on page 3)