SouthernRegisterSpring06
5/2/06
8:18 PM
Page 1
the THE NEWSLETTER OF THE
CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SOUTHERN CULTURE • SPRING 2006
THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI
Global Faulkner Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference July 23–27, 2006 The story leading up to the rarely seen photograph on this page has become familiar to many Faulkner readers. On the morning of November 10, 1950, a Swedish journalist telephoned Rowan Oak to give Faulkner the news that the Swedish Academy had decided to award him the Nobel Prize. Faulkner expressed his appreciation, but when asked if he were looking forward to a trip to Stockholm, Faulkner replied, “I won’t be able to come to receive the prize myself. It’s too far away. I am a farmer down here and I can’t get away.” Immediately afterwards, numerous people went into action, ranging from the U.S. State Department and Faulkner’s publisher, Random House, to family and friends in Oxford. The writer’s legendary shyness and his uneasiness in “distinguished” gatherings were genuine, as was his insistence on personal privacy. Somehow, it all came together—perhaps out of Faulkner’s desire, apparent only later with the delivery of his Nobel Prize speech, to say something he thought needed to be said—and on December 6, with his 17-year-old daughter, Jill, he boarded the plane to New York, en route to Stockholm. At that point, William Faulkner, of Oxford, Mississippi, and Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha, officially became Global Faulkner: his work beginning the journey into the minds of readers and writers around the world as a story they would see as in many ways their own. Nearly 60 years later, Faulkner’s recreation of the South has become one of the sharpest mirrors of global reality that we have. The 33rd Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference will explore for five days such topics as the reflections of Faulkner’s South in Japan, Spain, Italy, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa, in terms of civil war, the endangered wilderness, the poetics of memory, the hierarchies of race and class, and the economies of modernity. These topics will be taken up by Melanie Benson, Manuel Brancano, Keith Cartwright, Leigh Anne Duck, George Handley, Alfred
Illustrating the 2006 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference poster and program is a 1950 Commercial Appeal photograph of Faulkner saying good-bye to his wife, Estelle, as he and their daughter, Jill, prepare to board a plane in Memphis for New York, en route to Stockholm, to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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