Panel. Gifting and Debt

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

26-7-2017 10:30 AM

Description

  • Intruder in the Dust: Money, Gifting, and the Nobel Prize / Michael Wainwright, Royal Holloway. University of London
    Banking on his publisher’s continued interest in his work, and apparently speculating on the possible award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the gifted William Faulkner, struggling with the atypical A Fable, and with a perilously low bank balance, temporarily but concertedly reinvested himself in Yoknapatawpha County. The first major result of this expenditure was Intruder in the Dust (1948), which helped to secure him the 1949 Nobel Prize, but as Faulkner’s novel suggests, this award draws on related yet contradictory economies: while the conferral of esteem belongs to the economy of the gift, the financial benefits belong to the economy of money. The theoretical considerations of Jacques Derrida in Counterfeit Money (1992) confirm this suggestion in helping to parse the account of gifting opened at the beginning of Intruder in the Dust and intentionally never closed.
  • Racial Debts, Individual Slights, and Sleights of Hand in Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust / Mary A. Knighton, Aoyama Gakuin University
    Despite a long career peddling his wares in the literary marketplace, Faulkner’s real path to financial security only came with his novel Intruder in the Dust (1948), published to the fanfare of its Hollywood movie contract. The Nobel Prize in the wake of Intruder as both novel and film cemented Faulkner’s financial and cultural success. In this talk, I explore how money circulates within and outside the novel’s story to encompass both the complex alchemy of debt between Chick Mallison and Lucas Beauchamp and also Faulkner’s change of fortunes in attaining global cultural capital. In particular, I draw attention to how Faulkner’s fictional families form a money nexus that Lucas Beauchamp disrupts. Even as Faulkner’s families are spun from the “dust” of history, they tell a larger resonant story about future manipulations of wealth by those in power, which shapes what families and history itself could look like.
  • What’s Love Got To Do With It: The Price of Ice Cream in “Mississippi” / Zoran Kuzmanovich, Davidson College
    I examine Faulkner’s complex use of debt and recompense in “Mississippi”: as blueprint for humane (orderly and unracialized) exchange of goods and services linking “Mississippi” to the beginning and end of Intruder in the Dust, as ritualized language having to do with ultimate beginnings and ends (“the sermon owed to her”), as flooding (“Old Man said, ‘I do what I want to, when I want to. But I pay my way’”), and as ice cream. Seen in light of this comprehensive rhetorical strategy, Faulkner’s treatment of debt in this essay offers a more balanced portrait of Caroline Barr and of Faulkner, one in which there is as much room for a sense of nobility and solidarity as there is for a sense of “hyperracialized” ownership created for some readers by Faulkner’s paternalistic linking of Callie Barr’s service and (funeral service) to slavery and subordination.

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Jul 26th, 10:30 AM

Panel. Gifting and Debt

Nutt Auditorium

  • Intruder in the Dust: Money, Gifting, and the Nobel Prize / Michael Wainwright, Royal Holloway. University of London
    Banking on his publisher’s continued interest in his work, and apparently speculating on the possible award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the gifted William Faulkner, struggling with the atypical A Fable, and with a perilously low bank balance, temporarily but concertedly reinvested himself in Yoknapatawpha County. The first major result of this expenditure was Intruder in the Dust (1948), which helped to secure him the 1949 Nobel Prize, but as Faulkner’s novel suggests, this award draws on related yet contradictory economies: while the conferral of esteem belongs to the economy of the gift, the financial benefits belong to the economy of money. The theoretical considerations of Jacques Derrida in Counterfeit Money (1992) confirm this suggestion in helping to parse the account of gifting opened at the beginning of Intruder in the Dust and intentionally never closed.
  • Racial Debts, Individual Slights, and Sleights of Hand in Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust / Mary A. Knighton, Aoyama Gakuin University
    Despite a long career peddling his wares in the literary marketplace, Faulkner’s real path to financial security only came with his novel Intruder in the Dust (1948), published to the fanfare of its Hollywood movie contract. The Nobel Prize in the wake of Intruder as both novel and film cemented Faulkner’s financial and cultural success. In this talk, I explore how money circulates within and outside the novel’s story to encompass both the complex alchemy of debt between Chick Mallison and Lucas Beauchamp and also Faulkner’s change of fortunes in attaining global cultural capital. In particular, I draw attention to how Faulkner’s fictional families form a money nexus that Lucas Beauchamp disrupts. Even as Faulkner’s families are spun from the “dust” of history, they tell a larger resonant story about future manipulations of wealth by those in power, which shapes what families and history itself could look like.
  • What’s Love Got To Do With It: The Price of Ice Cream in “Mississippi” / Zoran Kuzmanovich, Davidson College
    I examine Faulkner’s complex use of debt and recompense in “Mississippi”: as blueprint for humane (orderly and unracialized) exchange of goods and services linking “Mississippi” to the beginning and end of Intruder in the Dust, as ritualized language having to do with ultimate beginnings and ends (“the sermon owed to her”), as flooding (“Old Man said, ‘I do what I want to, when I want to. But I pay my way’”), and as ice cream. Seen in light of this comprehensive rhetorical strategy, Faulkner’s treatment of debt in this essay offers a more balanced portrait of Caroline Barr and of Faulkner, one in which there is as much room for a sense of nobility and solidarity as there is for a sense of “hyperracialized” ownership created for some readers by Faulkner’s paternalistic linking of Callie Barr’s service and (funeral service) to slavery and subordination.