Panel. Visions of History

Location

Yerby Center Auditorium

Start Date

23-7-2014 8:00 AM

Description

  • Ghost Stories: History and the Supernatural in The Unvanquished / Frank P. Fury, Monmouth University
    Throughout the stories that compose The Unvanquished, Faulkner alludes frequently to the supernatural to remind his reader of the monstrous (i.e. unnatural) events of the Civil War and the fears implicit in being a Southerner during this time. The novel consistently demonstrates the manner in which history and legend may become intertwined and indeed indistinguishable. This paper contends that The Unvanquished figures the history of the South as a supernatural “faux” history—a past that defies logic or simple explanation—of a blasted, haunted landscape. Faulkner’s history-in-the-making in The Unvanquished is, in fact, largely rendered vis-à-vis a “ghostly” trope: in a novel that more generally contemplates a Purgatory-like, negative state of being (UN-vanquished), the great horror Faulkner depicts is that the South as the Sartorises had come both to know it and represent it would cease to be and instead become understandable only via legend or myth.
  • "The Paper Old and Faded and Falling to Pieces": Absalom, Absalom and the Pulping of History / Brooks E. Hefner, James Madison University
    Critics of William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! have long questioned why, in a text so obsessed with getting the minute historical details of Southern history correct, Faulkner gets Caribbean history so wrong, essentially ignoring the Haitian revolution in order to build a sensational backstory for Thomas Sutpen. In this talk, I will argue that Absalom! Absalom! enacts what I call a “pulping” of history: destroying, recycling, and repurposing the historical record, while layering a series of popular narrative and ideological tropes—characteristic of pulp magazines—over the history of Sutpen’s Hundred. The ephemeral traces of history (scratches on a stone, unsigned letters) give license to the novel’s many historians to construct and reconstruct a sensationalized history filled with monomaniacal demons, superhuman feats of strength, terrors of miscegenation, sexual conspiracies, and fiery destruction, tropes exceedingly common across a host of pulp genres in the mid-1930s.
  • Between Allegory and History: Reading William Faulkner's A Fable / Satoshi Kanazawa, Kyoto Prefectural University
    A Fable centers upon an idea that the one who was buried under the tomb of an unknown soldier was in fact Christ. There are two incompatible elements in this idea: the timeless allegory of Christ's Passion and the real historicity of the World War I. Faulkner's long struggle to write this novel was due to the difficulty to fuse these elements into a novelistic narrative. To achieve this peculiar fusion Faulkner created a new style that encompasses the whole history of mankind by way of typology. Besides, Faulkner weaved into the allegory of Corporal/Christ many historical details of the World War I. These historical facts are overlaid with allegorical meanings while they retain original historicity. Thus A Fable becomes a uniquely historical/allegorical novel in which Faulkner examines the morality of war against the background of men's whole history.

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Jul 23rd, 8:00 AM

Panel. Visions of History

Yerby Center Auditorium

  • Ghost Stories: History and the Supernatural in The Unvanquished / Frank P. Fury, Monmouth University
    Throughout the stories that compose The Unvanquished, Faulkner alludes frequently to the supernatural to remind his reader of the monstrous (i.e. unnatural) events of the Civil War and the fears implicit in being a Southerner during this time. The novel consistently demonstrates the manner in which history and legend may become intertwined and indeed indistinguishable. This paper contends that The Unvanquished figures the history of the South as a supernatural “faux” history—a past that defies logic or simple explanation—of a blasted, haunted landscape. Faulkner’s history-in-the-making in The Unvanquished is, in fact, largely rendered vis-à-vis a “ghostly” trope: in a novel that more generally contemplates a Purgatory-like, negative state of being (UN-vanquished), the great horror Faulkner depicts is that the South as the Sartorises had come both to know it and represent it would cease to be and instead become understandable only via legend or myth.
  • "The Paper Old and Faded and Falling to Pieces": Absalom, Absalom and the Pulping of History / Brooks E. Hefner, James Madison University
    Critics of William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! have long questioned why, in a text so obsessed with getting the minute historical details of Southern history correct, Faulkner gets Caribbean history so wrong, essentially ignoring the Haitian revolution in order to build a sensational backstory for Thomas Sutpen. In this talk, I will argue that Absalom! Absalom! enacts what I call a “pulping” of history: destroying, recycling, and repurposing the historical record, while layering a series of popular narrative and ideological tropes—characteristic of pulp magazines—over the history of Sutpen’s Hundred. The ephemeral traces of history (scratches on a stone, unsigned letters) give license to the novel’s many historians to construct and reconstruct a sensationalized history filled with monomaniacal demons, superhuman feats of strength, terrors of miscegenation, sexual conspiracies, and fiery destruction, tropes exceedingly common across a host of pulp genres in the mid-1930s.
  • Between Allegory and History: Reading William Faulkner's A Fable / Satoshi Kanazawa, Kyoto Prefectural University
    A Fable centers upon an idea that the one who was buried under the tomb of an unknown soldier was in fact Christ. There are two incompatible elements in this idea: the timeless allegory of Christ's Passion and the real historicity of the World War I. Faulkner's long struggle to write this novel was due to the difficulty to fuse these elements into a novelistic narrative. To achieve this peculiar fusion Faulkner created a new style that encompasses the whole history of mankind by way of typology. Besides, Faulkner weaved into the allegory of Corporal/Christ many historical details of the World War I. These historical facts are overlaid with allegorical meanings while they retain original historicity. Thus A Fable becomes a uniquely historical/allegorical novel in which Faulkner examines the morality of war against the background of men's whole history.