Panel. Currency Conversions: Calculating Performances in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

25-7-2017 2:00 PM

Description

  • “That Delta”: Land, Women’s Sexuality, and the Miscegenation of Money / John N. Duvall, Purdue University
    My talk explores an underlying connection in Faulkner’s fiction between the cotton market and the marketing of women’s sexuality, a connection that unites Freud’s sexual fetish with Marx’s commodity fetishism. Starting with statements by Horace Benbow and Ike McCaslin about the easy money that can be made growing cotton in the Mississippi Delta, I consider the sexualized and racialized subtexts of their words. These subtexts emerge from another meaning of Delta (the triangle as an ancient symbol of female sexuality) lurking both in their comments and in the context of their comments. Taken together, these men’s comments suggest that capitalist accumulation undermines the color line. Capital, quite simply, doesn’t care about whiteness. With this understanding, I turn to the way that Jason Compson’s sense of his white masculinity is imperiled by his failed speculation in both the cotton market and the prostitution market.
  • Too Small to Fail: Jason Compson’s Day of Diminishing Returns / Ted Atkinson, Mississippi State University
    For Jason Compson III, in The Sound and the Fury, April 6, 1928, is a day of setbacks that undermine the narrative of financial acumen thwarted by stolen opportunity he has constructed in response to declining family fortunes and class status. Jason’s unsatisfying job in the feed store leaves him mired in the quotidian getting and spending of the tertiary economy. He acts out by eschewing customer service and channeling aggrievement in pursuit of the means to reverse his precipitous fall. The power that Jason imagines money affording him makes it a currency of ever-increasing necessity and symbolic value in his struggle against diminishment. The humiliation Jason experiences reveals the folly of investing in money as a sure thing for egoistic enhancement and culminates in a moment of crisis and public spectacle when he must confront the reality of how small his stature has become.
  • Dress for Success: Clothing as Currency in The Hamlet / Christopher Rieger, Southeast Missouri State University
    In this paper, I examine the notion of clothing as currency in The Hamlet, arguing that clothes function similarly to money in the novel, facilitating exchange while also conveying a certain social capital.. Not only do we see the value of clothing in the eyes of others shift in the novel, but also the social standing of the people wearing the clothes. My primary focus is on Flem Snopes and the ways that he uses dress to “fashion” a new image of himself, an image that paves the way for a new social position and, indeed, a new life. In a sense, Flem engages in cross-dressing, transgressing boundaries not of gender but of class. I will conclude by introducing the newly theorized psychological concept of “enclothed cognition” to show how recent research suggests a measurable effect of sartorial choices on the wearer of clothes, not just the observers of them.

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Jul 25th, 2:00 PM

Panel. Currency Conversions: Calculating Performances in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha

Nutt Auditorium

  • “That Delta”: Land, Women’s Sexuality, and the Miscegenation of Money / John N. Duvall, Purdue University
    My talk explores an underlying connection in Faulkner’s fiction between the cotton market and the marketing of women’s sexuality, a connection that unites Freud’s sexual fetish with Marx’s commodity fetishism. Starting with statements by Horace Benbow and Ike McCaslin about the easy money that can be made growing cotton in the Mississippi Delta, I consider the sexualized and racialized subtexts of their words. These subtexts emerge from another meaning of Delta (the triangle as an ancient symbol of female sexuality) lurking both in their comments and in the context of their comments. Taken together, these men’s comments suggest that capitalist accumulation undermines the color line. Capital, quite simply, doesn’t care about whiteness. With this understanding, I turn to the way that Jason Compson’s sense of his white masculinity is imperiled by his failed speculation in both the cotton market and the prostitution market.
  • Too Small to Fail: Jason Compson’s Day of Diminishing Returns / Ted Atkinson, Mississippi State University
    For Jason Compson III, in The Sound and the Fury, April 6, 1928, is a day of setbacks that undermine the narrative of financial acumen thwarted by stolen opportunity he has constructed in response to declining family fortunes and class status. Jason’s unsatisfying job in the feed store leaves him mired in the quotidian getting and spending of the tertiary economy. He acts out by eschewing customer service and channeling aggrievement in pursuit of the means to reverse his precipitous fall. The power that Jason imagines money affording him makes it a currency of ever-increasing necessity and symbolic value in his struggle against diminishment. The humiliation Jason experiences reveals the folly of investing in money as a sure thing for egoistic enhancement and culminates in a moment of crisis and public spectacle when he must confront the reality of how small his stature has become.
  • Dress for Success: Clothing as Currency in The Hamlet / Christopher Rieger, Southeast Missouri State University
    In this paper, I examine the notion of clothing as currency in The Hamlet, arguing that clothes function similarly to money in the novel, facilitating exchange while also conveying a certain social capital.. Not only do we see the value of clothing in the eyes of others shift in the novel, but also the social standing of the people wearing the clothes. My primary focus is on Flem Snopes and the ways that he uses dress to “fashion” a new image of himself, an image that paves the way for a new social position and, indeed, a new life. In a sense, Flem engages in cross-dressing, transgressing boundaries not of gender but of class. I will conclude by introducing the newly theorized psychological concept of “enclothed cognition” to show how recent research suggests a measurable effect of sartorial choices on the wearer of clothes, not just the observers of them.