Panel. Faulkner and Death

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

11-7-2012 8:00 AM

Description

  • Commodification and Faulkner’s Modernized Funereal Performances / Victoria M. Bryan, University of Mississippi
    Faulkner explores differently modernized groups by illustrating their reactions to death. When Vardaman asks if his mother is going to go to the same place that “all those rabbits and possums” (66) went, he exhibits a closeness to death and dying than that exhibited in Red’s funeral in Sanctuary in which his corpse is figured as a spectacle. In “Death Drag,” the mere idea of seeing a dead body creates such fear that the crowd becomes hysterical. These relationships with and reactions to death indicate a process of modernization underway in the American South. The progression of the commodification of death and the rise of the death industry in texts such as As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and “Death Drag” force a reconsideration of the modernity of funereal practices and the resulting spectacle of the dead body.
  • Mourning Change: Death and Loss in Go Down, Moses / Elizabeth Fielder, University of Mississippi
    The “Old Injun’s mound;” “shards of pottery and broken bottles;” twenty-five dollars’ worth of flowers: Go Down, Moses is a text filled with death and burial. The bodies interred in the earth are geographically fixed, but the rituals that encompass the various mourning processes move with fluidity between larger global traditions that reveal Yoknapatawpha’s porosity. By focusing on the complicated relationship between Gavin Stevens and Mollie Beauchamp over her grandson’s death, this paper examines funerals in Go Down, Moses as performative rituals where characters adopt and redefine social roles. By considering this, we see how these rituals act as a site to perform the racialized economy of a region going through watershed changes.
  • William Faulkner and the Southern Culture of Death / Charles Reagan Wilson, University of Mississippi
    Southern culture in the years from the Civil War to World War II was steeped in an awareness of, and sometimes an obsession with, death. The southern culture of death was a familiarity with, and acceptance of, death as a part of life. In the years when Faulkner grew up and lived in Mississippi, southerners, black and white, learned vividly of human limitation and the inevitability of mortality. The Confederate cult of the dead, high mortality rates, the public nature of violent death, death imagery of a dying Christ on the cross, a predominant evangelical theology stressing death as the point of judgment for the afterlife, and a storytelling folk culture of death--all led southerners to dwell on loss and mortality. This paper will relate Faulkner's work to a southern culture of death. His stories revolve around such death-related topics as murder, suicide, lynchings, ghosts of the past, the afterlife, grave tampering, fratricide, decaying corpses, and even necrophilia. While other Americans were embracing a modern American way of death that stressed a denial of death, southerners like Faulkner embraced a naturalistic--but perhaps also gothic--understanding of mortality.

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Conference proceeding

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Jul 11th, 8:00 AM

Panel. Faulkner and Death

Nutt Auditorium

  • Commodification and Faulkner’s Modernized Funereal Performances / Victoria M. Bryan, University of Mississippi
    Faulkner explores differently modernized groups by illustrating their reactions to death. When Vardaman asks if his mother is going to go to the same place that “all those rabbits and possums” (66) went, he exhibits a closeness to death and dying than that exhibited in Red’s funeral in Sanctuary in which his corpse is figured as a spectacle. In “Death Drag,” the mere idea of seeing a dead body creates such fear that the crowd becomes hysterical. These relationships with and reactions to death indicate a process of modernization underway in the American South. The progression of the commodification of death and the rise of the death industry in texts such as As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and “Death Drag” force a reconsideration of the modernity of funereal practices and the resulting spectacle of the dead body.
  • Mourning Change: Death and Loss in Go Down, Moses / Elizabeth Fielder, University of Mississippi
    The “Old Injun’s mound;” “shards of pottery and broken bottles;” twenty-five dollars’ worth of flowers: Go Down, Moses is a text filled with death and burial. The bodies interred in the earth are geographically fixed, but the rituals that encompass the various mourning processes move with fluidity between larger global traditions that reveal Yoknapatawpha’s porosity. By focusing on the complicated relationship between Gavin Stevens and Mollie Beauchamp over her grandson’s death, this paper examines funerals in Go Down, Moses as performative rituals where characters adopt and redefine social roles. By considering this, we see how these rituals act as a site to perform the racialized economy of a region going through watershed changes.
  • William Faulkner and the Southern Culture of Death / Charles Reagan Wilson, University of Mississippi
    Southern culture in the years from the Civil War to World War II was steeped in an awareness of, and sometimes an obsession with, death. The southern culture of death was a familiarity with, and acceptance of, death as a part of life. In the years when Faulkner grew up and lived in Mississippi, southerners, black and white, learned vividly of human limitation and the inevitability of mortality. The Confederate cult of the dead, high mortality rates, the public nature of violent death, death imagery of a dying Christ on the cross, a predominant evangelical theology stressing death as the point of judgment for the afterlife, and a storytelling folk culture of death--all led southerners to dwell on loss and mortality. This paper will relate Faulkner's work to a southern culture of death. His stories revolve around such death-related topics as murder, suicide, lynchings, ghosts of the past, the afterlife, grave tampering, fratricide, decaying corpses, and even necrophilia. While other Americans were embracing a modern American way of death that stressed a denial of death, southerners like Faulkner embraced a naturalistic--but perhaps also gothic--understanding of mortality.