PresentationTitle

Panel. Faulknerian Temporalities

Location

Yerby Center Auditorium

Start Date

23-7-2014 9:30 AM

Description

  • "The Middle Distance": Structures of Temporality in Lena Grove's Light in August / Katherine Isabel Bondy, University of California at Berkeley
    Many critics have argued for Lena Grove’s embodiment of “eternal time” in Light in August, placing her beyond the sphere of narrative temporality. In contrast, this paper argues that Lena Grove acts as an essential apparatus for understanding the construction and motion of time in Faulkner’s narrative world. In particular, it focuses on her embodiment of “the middle distance”—a phrase that carries both narratological and theoretical implications—and the productive forms of conscious temporality it opens up. From the physical fact of her pregnancy to her narrative surroundings of roads, wagons, and trains, Lena Grove’s Light in August is steeped in a dynamic sense of time. Traveling through Lena’s ever-evolving present, one shaped acutely by the pressure of past and future moments, this paper builds toward a model of storytelling and reading that is equally dynamic and rooted in the “open duration” of Faulkner’s idiomatic language.
  • "Moving Sitting Still": The Economics of Time in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! / Jordan Burke, Yale University
    In this essay, I identify a convergence of two experiences of time in Absalom, Absalom! and argue that this convergence is created by a gradual shift in the southern economy from precapitalist “independence” to capitalist dependence. While foregrounded in Sutpen, the “economics of time” in the novel are visible in compressed form in almost every character. As Sutpen builds a fortress that hangs in “sunny [eternal] suspension” impervious to the vicissitudes of history and the world market, he paradoxically embraces the logic of an increasingly capitalist marketplace. And as Quentin builds his own narrative, this economic and temporal contradiction becomes intensified. For in the postbellum South, the precapitalist plantation system and its concept of time can persist only as elaborate fictions. Ultimately, the traumatic fact that Sutpen and Quentin, as well as their respective generations, suppress is that masters are inevitably (and deceptively) mastered by the market.
  • Faulkner and the Temporal Novel / George Porter Thomas, University of California at Davis
    Following the high modernism of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner turned towards a more complex investigation of time and history in Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, texts which I read as marking a distinctive phase in his effort to represent temporality. Of course the earlier high modernist Faulkner can (and has) been read temporally, but such analyses often focus on things like trauma, repetition, and involuntary memory—that is, on the representation of individual consciousness in the present. I argue that in these later temporal novels, Faulkner seeks to portray the metonymically present past, what the historical theorist Eelco Runia calls “the epiphanic moment in which historical reality stops being absently present in words and phrases and stands before us.” For me, this is a central (and paradoxical) task of Faulkner’s mature fiction: to represent the way the past remains present outside of representation.

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Jul 23rd, 9:30 AM

Panel. Faulknerian Temporalities

Yerby Center Auditorium

  • "The Middle Distance": Structures of Temporality in Lena Grove's Light in August / Katherine Isabel Bondy, University of California at Berkeley
    Many critics have argued for Lena Grove’s embodiment of “eternal time” in Light in August, placing her beyond the sphere of narrative temporality. In contrast, this paper argues that Lena Grove acts as an essential apparatus for understanding the construction and motion of time in Faulkner’s narrative world. In particular, it focuses on her embodiment of “the middle distance”—a phrase that carries both narratological and theoretical implications—and the productive forms of conscious temporality it opens up. From the physical fact of her pregnancy to her narrative surroundings of roads, wagons, and trains, Lena Grove’s Light in August is steeped in a dynamic sense of time. Traveling through Lena’s ever-evolving present, one shaped acutely by the pressure of past and future moments, this paper builds toward a model of storytelling and reading that is equally dynamic and rooted in the “open duration” of Faulkner’s idiomatic language.
  • "Moving Sitting Still": The Economics of Time in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! / Jordan Burke, Yale University
    In this essay, I identify a convergence of two experiences of time in Absalom, Absalom! and argue that this convergence is created by a gradual shift in the southern economy from precapitalist “independence” to capitalist dependence. While foregrounded in Sutpen, the “economics of time” in the novel are visible in compressed form in almost every character. As Sutpen builds a fortress that hangs in “sunny [eternal] suspension” impervious to the vicissitudes of history and the world market, he paradoxically embraces the logic of an increasingly capitalist marketplace. And as Quentin builds his own narrative, this economic and temporal contradiction becomes intensified. For in the postbellum South, the precapitalist plantation system and its concept of time can persist only as elaborate fictions. Ultimately, the traumatic fact that Sutpen and Quentin, as well as their respective generations, suppress is that masters are inevitably (and deceptively) mastered by the market.
  • Faulkner and the Temporal Novel / George Porter Thomas, University of California at Davis
    Following the high modernism of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, Faulkner turned towards a more complex investigation of time and history in Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, texts which I read as marking a distinctive phase in his effort to represent temporality. Of course the earlier high modernist Faulkner can (and has) been read temporally, but such analyses often focus on things like trauma, repetition, and involuntary memory—that is, on the representation of individual consciousness in the present. I argue that in these later temporal novels, Faulkner seeks to portray the metonymically present past, what the historical theorist Eelco Runia calls “the epiphanic moment in which historical reality stops being absently present in words and phrases and stands before us.” For me, this is a central (and paradoxical) task of Faulkner’s mature fiction: to represent the way the past remains present outside of representation.