Panel. Cold War Faulkner

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

8-7-2012 4:00 PM

Description

  • The Unlikely Patriot: Faulkner as Cold Warrior and Goodwill Ambassador for the U. S. Department of State / Deborah Cohn, Indiana University
    Between 1954 and 1961, Faulkner was recruited by the State Department to serve as good will ambassador and travel to “strategic” countries in Latin America, Asia, and Europe. These were the years of the Cold War, and as a Nobel Prize winner, Faulkner’s very person attested to the height of U.S. cultural achievement, while his style was figured as expressing artistic—and, by extension, democratic—freedom, as well as opposition to the social realism underpinning officially sanctioned Soviet politics and art. In this paper, I examine how constructions of Faulkner as both southerner and American interacted with one another on these tours. I further study how both his official travels and his pronouncements on race relations in the United States played directly into the State Department’s battle against communism.
  • We—He and Us—Should Confederate: Intruder in the Dust, the Dixiecrat Campaign, and Faulkner's Cold War Agenda / Alan Nadel, University of Kentucky
    Intruder in the Dust conducts a dialogue with Strom Thurman’s 1948 Dixiecrat Presidential Campaign, in the context of Cold War premises that inform Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech. These premises, consistent with the policy of “containment,” made segregation a palpable threat to the nation’s ability to win the Cold War. To reimagine a nation in which the South participates in, rather than obstructs, the struggle to prevail over Communism, Faulkner stages, in the events surrounding the death of Vinson Gowrie, the end of the “separate but equal” doctrine supported the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Fred Vinson. In so doing, Faulkner adapts Great Expectations by inverting the power dynamics of Dickens’s novel, placing the child in the role of Magwitch who must devote his life to repaying the man—here Beauchamp—who saved him in the marshes. This inversion enables Faulkner to embrace the principles of the Dixiecrat campaign in order to renounce its objective.
  • William Faulkner and the Problem of Cold War Modernism / Harilaos "Harry" Stecopoulos, University of Iowa
    This paper examines Faulkner’s most difficult experience with U.S. cultural diplomacy: his participation in the People-to-People (PTP) program. I first examine the absurd, yet pointed, letter with which Faulkner began his official duties for the PTP program, and then turn to his wry commentary on cold war modernism in The Mansion (1959). Through a linked reading of those two texts, I argue that Faulkner’s work for the PTP program prompted an attempt to reclaim from the cold war state the very modernist aesthetic he was meant to wield on behalf of the anti-Communist struggle. That attempt took fragmented shape, but in its very messiness, Faulkner’s riposte to the state made manifest the writer’s refusal to surrender his aesthetic to those cold warriors who found in modernism little more than a propagandistic symbol of artistic and popular freedom.

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Jul 8th, 4:00 PM

Panel. Cold War Faulkner

Nutt Auditorium

  • The Unlikely Patriot: Faulkner as Cold Warrior and Goodwill Ambassador for the U. S. Department of State / Deborah Cohn, Indiana University
    Between 1954 and 1961, Faulkner was recruited by the State Department to serve as good will ambassador and travel to “strategic” countries in Latin America, Asia, and Europe. These were the years of the Cold War, and as a Nobel Prize winner, Faulkner’s very person attested to the height of U.S. cultural achievement, while his style was figured as expressing artistic—and, by extension, democratic—freedom, as well as opposition to the social realism underpinning officially sanctioned Soviet politics and art. In this paper, I examine how constructions of Faulkner as both southerner and American interacted with one another on these tours. I further study how both his official travels and his pronouncements on race relations in the United States played directly into the State Department’s battle against communism.
  • We—He and Us—Should Confederate: Intruder in the Dust, the Dixiecrat Campaign, and Faulkner's Cold War Agenda / Alan Nadel, University of Kentucky
    Intruder in the Dust conducts a dialogue with Strom Thurman’s 1948 Dixiecrat Presidential Campaign, in the context of Cold War premises that inform Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech. These premises, consistent with the policy of “containment,” made segregation a palpable threat to the nation’s ability to win the Cold War. To reimagine a nation in which the South participates in, rather than obstructs, the struggle to prevail over Communism, Faulkner stages, in the events surrounding the death of Vinson Gowrie, the end of the “separate but equal” doctrine supported the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Fred Vinson. In so doing, Faulkner adapts Great Expectations by inverting the power dynamics of Dickens’s novel, placing the child in the role of Magwitch who must devote his life to repaying the man—here Beauchamp—who saved him in the marshes. This inversion enables Faulkner to embrace the principles of the Dixiecrat campaign in order to renounce its objective.
  • William Faulkner and the Problem of Cold War Modernism / Harilaos "Harry" Stecopoulos, University of Iowa
    This paper examines Faulkner’s most difficult experience with U.S. cultural diplomacy: his participation in the People-to-People (PTP) program. I first examine the absurd, yet pointed, letter with which Faulkner began his official duties for the PTP program, and then turn to his wry commentary on cold war modernism in The Mansion (1959). Through a linked reading of those two texts, I argue that Faulkner’s work for the PTP program prompted an attempt to reclaim from the cold war state the very modernist aesthetic he was meant to wield on behalf of the anti-Communist struggle. That attempt took fragmented shape, but in its very messiness, Faulkner’s riposte to the state made manifest the writer’s refusal to surrender his aesthetic to those cold warriors who found in modernism little more than a propagandistic symbol of artistic and popular freedom.