Panel. Tricksters and "Fathers": Native Figures in Faulkner and U. S. Literature

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

20-7-2016 9:30 AM

Description

  • Word Wars and Trickster Figures: The Implications of Native American Storytelling in the Work of William Faulkner and Gerald Vizenor / Leslie Walker Bickford, Winthrop University
    Native American critical frameworks can help us to experience Faulkner differently, especially in the area of oral storytelling. An exploration of the different ways in which Faulkner and Native theorist and creative writer Gerald Vizenor represent and employ Native American oral storytelling in their work highlights both the ways in which Native peoples have been mythologized through mainstream discourse and the ways in which language can be used to dismantle that myth. Complete abstract can be downloaded from "Additonal Files".
  • Trangression, Mimicry, and Native Slavery: An Analysis of American Indian Trickster Figures in “A Justice” and “Red Leaves” / Lin Bin, Xiamen University
    Generally speaking, William Faulkner’s fiction represents a thorough inspection of the social and cultural practice of boundary drawing as well as an in-depth revelation of its moral ethical norms in the social, cultural and literary contexts of the American South. As a significant trope of the cultural “other” marked with boundary crossing, the trickster figure plays the role of a destructive agent of an oppressive hierarchical system by combating subjugation from within. This thesis looks into Faulkner’s fictional construction of American Indian images in his two thematically interrelated short stories “Red Leaves” (1930) and “A Justice” (1931) with a view to reveal his critique of colonial culture of the American South through black-Indian relations. In particular, the issue of native slavery is addressed as an institution of internal colonization by examining the Indian trickster’s double identity as colonized/colonizer, and its relationship to the development of Southern modernity is also tentatively explored.
  • “A Wilderness of Wild Beasts and Wilder Men”: Tracking Faulkner’s Native South through Hawthorne’s Native New England / Anne MacMaster, Millsaps College
    Faulkner writes about the Chickasaws of Mississippi in ways worth comparing to Hawthorne’s writing about the Pequawkets of New England. Both authors use the resources of fiction imaginatively to explore cultural contacts between Native American and non-Native culture. But more than Hawthorne, Faulkner calls attention to his own orientation as a non-Native writer in ways that – paradoxically, I ague – create deeper possibilities for him to explore Native American core values. Focusing on Hawthorne’s story “Roger Malvin’s Burial” and Faulkner’s stories “The Old People” and “The Bear,” I compare the two authors’ treatments of four of these Native American core values: cyclical (versus linear) time, sacred geography, oral (versus written) transmission of culture from Elder to youth, and reciprocity in the treatment of land and animals.
  • The Wild and the Tame: Sam Fathers as Ecological Indian / Robbie Ethridge, University of Mississippi
    In this paper, I propose to detail Faulkner’s use of the stereotype that Indian people have a special relationship to the environment, or as anthropologist Shepard Krech has dubbed it, “Ecological Indians.” Surely one of the most memorable and significant Ecological Indians in American literature is Sam Fathers, in Go Down, Moses. This paper examines Faulkner’s construction of Sam Fathers and argues that in “making up” his Indians, Faulkner borrowed from a concept so imbedded in the EuroAmerican psyche that we barely even recognize it as a construct anymore. And even contemporary literary critics do not question Sam’s Indianness on these grounds, and in fact, some seek his authentication on these grounds. This paper deconstructs Sam Fathers as an Ecological Indian and probes the unquestioned assumptions behind this characterization.

Relational Format

Conference proceeding

Additional Files
fy_2016_bickford.pdf (108 kB)
Bickford abstract

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Jul 20th, 9:30 AM

Panel. Tricksters and "Fathers": Native Figures in Faulkner and U. S. Literature

Nutt Auditorium

  • Word Wars and Trickster Figures: The Implications of Native American Storytelling in the Work of William Faulkner and Gerald Vizenor / Leslie Walker Bickford, Winthrop University
    Native American critical frameworks can help us to experience Faulkner differently, especially in the area of oral storytelling. An exploration of the different ways in which Faulkner and Native theorist and creative writer Gerald Vizenor represent and employ Native American oral storytelling in their work highlights both the ways in which Native peoples have been mythologized through mainstream discourse and the ways in which language can be used to dismantle that myth. Complete abstract can be downloaded from "Additonal Files".
  • Trangression, Mimicry, and Native Slavery: An Analysis of American Indian Trickster Figures in “A Justice” and “Red Leaves” / Lin Bin, Xiamen University
    Generally speaking, William Faulkner’s fiction represents a thorough inspection of the social and cultural practice of boundary drawing as well as an in-depth revelation of its moral ethical norms in the social, cultural and literary contexts of the American South. As a significant trope of the cultural “other” marked with boundary crossing, the trickster figure plays the role of a destructive agent of an oppressive hierarchical system by combating subjugation from within. This thesis looks into Faulkner’s fictional construction of American Indian images in his two thematically interrelated short stories “Red Leaves” (1930) and “A Justice” (1931) with a view to reveal his critique of colonial culture of the American South through black-Indian relations. In particular, the issue of native slavery is addressed as an institution of internal colonization by examining the Indian trickster’s double identity as colonized/colonizer, and its relationship to the development of Southern modernity is also tentatively explored.
  • “A Wilderness of Wild Beasts and Wilder Men”: Tracking Faulkner’s Native South through Hawthorne’s Native New England / Anne MacMaster, Millsaps College
    Faulkner writes about the Chickasaws of Mississippi in ways worth comparing to Hawthorne’s writing about the Pequawkets of New England. Both authors use the resources of fiction imaginatively to explore cultural contacts between Native American and non-Native culture. But more than Hawthorne, Faulkner calls attention to his own orientation as a non-Native writer in ways that – paradoxically, I ague – create deeper possibilities for him to explore Native American core values. Focusing on Hawthorne’s story “Roger Malvin’s Burial” and Faulkner’s stories “The Old People” and “The Bear,” I compare the two authors’ treatments of four of these Native American core values: cyclical (versus linear) time, sacred geography, oral (versus written) transmission of culture from Elder to youth, and reciprocity in the treatment of land and animals.
  • The Wild and the Tame: Sam Fathers as Ecological Indian / Robbie Ethridge, University of Mississippi
    In this paper, I propose to detail Faulkner’s use of the stereotype that Indian people have a special relationship to the environment, or as anthropologist Shepard Krech has dubbed it, “Ecological Indians.” Surely one of the most memorable and significant Ecological Indians in American literature is Sam Fathers, in Go Down, Moses. This paper examines Faulkner’s construction of Sam Fathers and argues that in “making up” his Indians, Faulkner borrowed from a concept so imbedded in the EuroAmerican psyche that we barely even recognize it as a construct anymore. And even contemporary literary critics do not question Sam’s Indianness on these grounds, and in fact, some seek his authentication on these grounds. This paper deconstructs Sam Fathers as an Ecological Indian and probes the unquestioned assumptions behind this characterization.