Panel. History, Power, and Gender

Location

Yerby Center Auditorium

Start Date

23-7-2014 11:00 AM

Description

  • "Endure and Then Endure, Without Rhyme or Reason or Hope of Reward": Genealogy, Knowledge, and Power in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! / Jaclyn Crumbley Carver, University of Iowa
    The paper explores the ways female-narrated histories, often competing with male genealogies in Faulkner, inform and challenge accepted historical narrative. It uses Michel Foucault’s conception of genealogies as histories which receive disparity and invite multiplicity to discuss two female characters, Caroline Compson and Rosa Coldfield. While Caroline Compson’s sense of persecution and her elevation of the Bascomb line through her son Jason challenge her husband’s right to dominate the family’s history, Rosa Coldfield, through her embattled status as narrator, attempts to reshape the narrative of the Civil War and trace the destruction of the South through the fall of Sutpen. The paper argues that Faulkner’s portrayal of female narratives suggests that history and narrative are complicated and varied shapings of competing ways of knowing. Ultimately the paper proposes genealogies as subversive histories that work to expose and thus destabilize knowledge and power.
  • Faulkner's (Dead) Women: Speaking Corpses and Radical Historians / Rachel Watson, University of Chicago
    Focusing on the recurring figure of the “speaking” dead woman—including Addie Bundren, Joanna Burden, and the McCaslin slave Eunice—this paper considers how in Faulkner’s work the condition of being dead often figures as both an ontological position and an epistemological resource, one that offers access to otherwise “unknowable” historical knowledge. This reading suggests a new way of thinking about how Faulkner imagined and narrated American racial history during the era of Jim Crow, specifically through a framework in which the formal practice of literary point of view could work both for and against desires for essential racial difference and a mythic Southern past. This paper also suggests how the contemporaneous discourse of applied forensics—which took corpses (and other material objects) to be “self-evident”—dovetailed with interpretive practices that sought to allow the literary text to “speak for itself,” a hermeneutic soon to be institutionalized as “close reading.”
  • War Begotten, War Belied: The Paradox of "Probation" in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! / Sarah Walker, University of Iowa
    The Civil War’s near total absence from Absalom, Absalom! creates a historical lack, one filled by the four-year “probation.” As a plot device, the probation between Henry and Bon (and Supten) morphs from a dispute over infidelity to incest to miscegenation. As a narrative device, the probation first negates but finally necessitates the presence of war. The absence of the Sutpen family’s decision about whether to let Bon marry Judith eventually forces the war to be narrated, but the other narrators’ silence regarding its content forces Quentin and Shreve to invent. By examining the paradoxical probation as an actual manifestation yet narrative disruption of the war, I posit Quentin and Shreve’s ghosting of Henry and Bon as an imagination of history that finally tells the truth. In reframing what constitutes history, Absalom presents a haunted historical narrative, utilizing trauma’s silencing effect to offer a ghostly memorialization of war.

Relational Format

Conference proceeding

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS
 
Jul 23rd, 11:00 AM

Panel. History, Power, and Gender

Yerby Center Auditorium

  • "Endure and Then Endure, Without Rhyme or Reason or Hope of Reward": Genealogy, Knowledge, and Power in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! / Jaclyn Crumbley Carver, University of Iowa
    The paper explores the ways female-narrated histories, often competing with male genealogies in Faulkner, inform and challenge accepted historical narrative. It uses Michel Foucault’s conception of genealogies as histories which receive disparity and invite multiplicity to discuss two female characters, Caroline Compson and Rosa Coldfield. While Caroline Compson’s sense of persecution and her elevation of the Bascomb line through her son Jason challenge her husband’s right to dominate the family’s history, Rosa Coldfield, through her embattled status as narrator, attempts to reshape the narrative of the Civil War and trace the destruction of the South through the fall of Sutpen. The paper argues that Faulkner’s portrayal of female narratives suggests that history and narrative are complicated and varied shapings of competing ways of knowing. Ultimately the paper proposes genealogies as subversive histories that work to expose and thus destabilize knowledge and power.
  • Faulkner's (Dead) Women: Speaking Corpses and Radical Historians / Rachel Watson, University of Chicago
    Focusing on the recurring figure of the “speaking” dead woman—including Addie Bundren, Joanna Burden, and the McCaslin slave Eunice—this paper considers how in Faulkner’s work the condition of being dead often figures as both an ontological position and an epistemological resource, one that offers access to otherwise “unknowable” historical knowledge. This reading suggests a new way of thinking about how Faulkner imagined and narrated American racial history during the era of Jim Crow, specifically through a framework in which the formal practice of literary point of view could work both for and against desires for essential racial difference and a mythic Southern past. This paper also suggests how the contemporaneous discourse of applied forensics—which took corpses (and other material objects) to be “self-evident”—dovetailed with interpretive practices that sought to allow the literary text to “speak for itself,” a hermeneutic soon to be institutionalized as “close reading.”
  • War Begotten, War Belied: The Paradox of "Probation" in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! / Sarah Walker, University of Iowa
    The Civil War’s near total absence from Absalom, Absalom! creates a historical lack, one filled by the four-year “probation.” As a plot device, the probation between Henry and Bon (and Supten) morphs from a dispute over infidelity to incest to miscegenation. As a narrative device, the probation first negates but finally necessitates the presence of war. The absence of the Sutpen family’s decision about whether to let Bon marry Judith eventually forces the war to be narrated, but the other narrators’ silence regarding its content forces Quentin and Shreve to invent. By examining the paradoxical probation as an actual manifestation yet narrative disruption of the war, I posit Quentin and Shreve’s ghosting of Henry and Bon as an imagination of history that finally tells the truth. In reframing what constitutes history, Absalom presents a haunted historical narrative, utilizing trauma’s silencing effect to offer a ghostly memorialization of war.