Panel. Native Soil North: Louise Erdrich's Reconfigurations of Faulknerian Space

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

19-7-2016 3:00 PM

Description

  • Damaged Bears and Crazed Bison: Crafting Mythologized Fauna, Original Peoples, and Eternal Land in Faulkner and Erdrich / Angela Jones, University of Wisconsin, Platteville
    Despite polarities between Faulkner’s South and Erdrich’s North, far more connects them: larger-than-life characters, anthropomorphic animals, and a grieving about changes in uses of their respective cherished land. Whereas Faulkner’s description of people and places in his native stories (e.g., “Red Leaves,” “The Bear,” etc.) give us a breadth of external, yet fully realized, identities, Erdrich creates descriptions more internally to create a visceral response to conditions of original peoples and misuses of land. As time has passed, both northern and southern land suffer from excess greed, which alters forever the destiny of people and the animals they revere, need, and symbolize. Faulkner tends to take the changes personally; they wound him as one who understands how to own the land properly. Erdrich understands the shared communal space of land, and sees misuse as affecting the community even as traditional values give hope.
  • From The Mausoleum to a Spider Web: Faulkner’s And Erdrich’s Takes On Hybridity / Melanie R. Anderson, Glenville State College
    In William Faulkner’s work, hybridity is usually a sign of confusion and leads characters to sterile lives as outcasts. While Sam Fathers may have a place of honor in the wilderness, he must physically disappear in the face of the South’s and America’s illusion of a homogenous future. By contrast, in The Beet Queen (1986), Louise Erdrich uses hybridity to signify openness and fluidity. Her characters of blended backgrounds do not disappear or obliterate their heritage; rather, they facilitate connection and build community. Instead of a narrative of “vanishings,” Erdrich uses images such as the spider web, open windows, and rain when describing Celestine and Dot and their relationships. Throughout Erdrich’s expansion of the mosaic of American literature, individuals caught between two cultures must recognize the border, but she allows them to permeate it and create a future—not disappear “in the mausoleum of … defeat” like Sam Fathers.
  • Race, Place, and (In)Justics: Parallels Between William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust and Louise Erdrich's The Round House / Phillip Gordon, University of Wisconsin-Platteville
    In Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, Joe Couts comes to terms with the rape of his mother by a white man on native land but simultaneously discovers the fault lines of race in America and, inadvertently, tells a timely story about violence against native women mere months before Congress unexpectedly stalled the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act over questions of legal authority on reservations. Though a monumental novel on its own, The Round House gains from comparison to William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. While her fictional reservation has often been compared to Faulkner’s mythic county, in these two novels, young narrators encounter legal systems (represented by a lawyer/uncle in Faulkner’s novel and a judge/father in Erdrich’s) predicated on racialized injustices. In both novels, the actions of the young narrator serve to explore those injustices within the parameters of the authors’ mythic geographies.

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Jul 19th, 3:00 PM

Panel. Native Soil North: Louise Erdrich's Reconfigurations of Faulknerian Space

Nutt Auditorium

  • Damaged Bears and Crazed Bison: Crafting Mythologized Fauna, Original Peoples, and Eternal Land in Faulkner and Erdrich / Angela Jones, University of Wisconsin, Platteville
    Despite polarities between Faulkner’s South and Erdrich’s North, far more connects them: larger-than-life characters, anthropomorphic animals, and a grieving about changes in uses of their respective cherished land. Whereas Faulkner’s description of people and places in his native stories (e.g., “Red Leaves,” “The Bear,” etc.) give us a breadth of external, yet fully realized, identities, Erdrich creates descriptions more internally to create a visceral response to conditions of original peoples and misuses of land. As time has passed, both northern and southern land suffer from excess greed, which alters forever the destiny of people and the animals they revere, need, and symbolize. Faulkner tends to take the changes personally; they wound him as one who understands how to own the land properly. Erdrich understands the shared communal space of land, and sees misuse as affecting the community even as traditional values give hope.
  • From The Mausoleum to a Spider Web: Faulkner’s And Erdrich’s Takes On Hybridity / Melanie R. Anderson, Glenville State College
    In William Faulkner’s work, hybridity is usually a sign of confusion and leads characters to sterile lives as outcasts. While Sam Fathers may have a place of honor in the wilderness, he must physically disappear in the face of the South’s and America’s illusion of a homogenous future. By contrast, in The Beet Queen (1986), Louise Erdrich uses hybridity to signify openness and fluidity. Her characters of blended backgrounds do not disappear or obliterate their heritage; rather, they facilitate connection and build community. Instead of a narrative of “vanishings,” Erdrich uses images such as the spider web, open windows, and rain when describing Celestine and Dot and their relationships. Throughout Erdrich’s expansion of the mosaic of American literature, individuals caught between two cultures must recognize the border, but she allows them to permeate it and create a future—not disappear “in the mausoleum of … defeat” like Sam Fathers.
  • Race, Place, and (In)Justics: Parallels Between William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust and Louise Erdrich's The Round House / Phillip Gordon, University of Wisconsin-Platteville
    In Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, Joe Couts comes to terms with the rape of his mother by a white man on native land but simultaneously discovers the fault lines of race in America and, inadvertently, tells a timely story about violence against native women mere months before Congress unexpectedly stalled the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act over questions of legal authority on reservations. Though a monumental novel on its own, The Round House gains from comparison to William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. While her fictional reservation has often been compared to Faulkner’s mythic county, in these two novels, young narrators encounter legal systems (represented by a lawyer/uncle in Faulkner’s novel and a judge/father in Erdrich’s) predicated on racialized injustices. In both novels, the actions of the young narrator serve to explore those injustices within the parameters of the authors’ mythic geographies.