Panel. A Speculative, Four-Part Economic Biography of William Faulkner

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

23-7-2017 2:30 PM

Description

  • “Carcassonne” and the Scene of Labor in Faulkner’s Early Work / Michael Zeitlin, University of British Columbia
    In 1931 Faulkner’s French translator Maurice Edgar Coindreau asked Faulkner why he had entitled one of his stories “Carcassonne.” He was unable to give me a clear-cut answer. ‘It’s a vision,’ he said, ‘a poetic vision . . . a young man who sees a horse. . . .’” In this paper I explore a cluster of Faulkner’s early prose and poetic works for their representation of the earth-bound scene of labor and war from which such transcendent visions seem to emerge. Along with “Carcassonne” I consider “The Hill,” “Black Music,” A Greening Bough, Faulkner’s letters home from New Haven and Toronto in 1918, and Sherwood Anderson’s reflection of the limping aviator in “A Meeting South.” I explore this material in relation to the letters and memoirs of “All the Dead Pilots” (1931), the American “cavalry of the clouds” who, in Flying for France (James McConnell 1917), became legendary founders of the air war myth: Raoul Lufberry, Victor Chapman, Norman Prince, Kiffin Rockwell, James McConnell, and Quentin Roosevelt.
  • “I Am Going Cold-Blooded Yankee Now”: Money, Media, and the Economic Parable in Faulkner’s Great Depression / Robert Jackson, University of Tulsa
    As a Mississippian, Faulkner saw the Great Depression’s privation firsthand, yet he also rode out the era in surprisingly comfortable financial circumstances. He began publishing short fiction in nationally distributed magazines in 1930, and in 1932 he made the first of numerous trips to Hollywood for screenwriting work. These lucrative opportunities marked him off starkly both from the under-monetized years of his earliest work and from the financial desperation besetting many of his neighbors in Oxford during the 1930s. How, then, might we account for the influence of these paradoxical economic currents in Faulkner’s “major” fiction of this period? I will explore the mutually constitutive relations among the short stories, screenwritings, and novels of the early 1930s (culminating with Absalom, Absalom! (1936), which I believe to be the most ambitious and comprehensive literary statement of Faulkner’s economic thought during this period), looking especially at how they register Faulkner’s own economic fortunes as well as the state of the world economy.
  • Pictorialism, Prolixity, and Spatial Form: Faulkner’s Post-Hollywood Racial Imaginary / Peter Lurie, University of Richmond
    Faulkner’s modernism founds its footing in the late 1920s and early ‘30s with his first great experimental novels, each of which demonstrate his use of interior monologue to meditate on Southern subjecthood and the region’s class ills. Following Sanctuary’s 1931 publishing and the first studio contract it prompted, Faulkner’s fiction altered, becoming more expansive, ambitious, and encompassing. This paper describes the broadened social and formal “scale” of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels and considers what role his encounter with the film medium played in this development. Faulkner’s work had always betrayed his interest in pictorialism. Yet as several examples suggest, such as his map of Yoknapatawpha for Absalom, Absalom!, this tendency increased and broadened across his later career. This paper uses ideas from image theory such as W. J. T. Mitchell’s “metapictures” and their suggestion of repleteness as well as Stephen Heath’s theory of the frame to suggest a relationship between Faulkner’s remunerations in Hollywood and the expanded lexical, syntactic, and formal workings in novels from Pylon to Go Down, Moses.
  • Financialization and Neoliberalism: A Snopes Genealogy / John T. Matthews, Boston University
    If The Hamlet shows Flem Snopes grasping the shift from agricultural production to finance capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century, The Town has the Snopeses take advantage of an emergent regime of financialization over the next decades. Unlike finance capitalism, in which the production of goods is underwritten by credit, financialization separates finance from nonfinancial activity. That transformation is intimated by projects in The Town that, like Montgomery Ward Snopes’s “Atelier Monty,” make money because “there aint no destructive consumption at all that’s got to be replenished at a definite production labor cost.” Writing decades into this phenomenon in the 1950s, Faulkner anticipates how financialization prepares for neoliberalism, a capitalist structure of accumulation profiting from the free movement of capital, evasion of state regulation, privatization of social services, regressive taxation, abandonment of capital-labor cooperation, and unrestrained corporate competition. Snopesism caricatures the fiction of free-market frontier entrepreneurialism neoliberalism comes to idolize.

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Jul 23rd, 2:30 PM

Panel. A Speculative, Four-Part Economic Biography of William Faulkner

Nutt Auditorium

  • “Carcassonne” and the Scene of Labor in Faulkner’s Early Work / Michael Zeitlin, University of British Columbia
    In 1931 Faulkner’s French translator Maurice Edgar Coindreau asked Faulkner why he had entitled one of his stories “Carcassonne.” He was unable to give me a clear-cut answer. ‘It’s a vision,’ he said, ‘a poetic vision . . . a young man who sees a horse. . . .’” In this paper I explore a cluster of Faulkner’s early prose and poetic works for their representation of the earth-bound scene of labor and war from which such transcendent visions seem to emerge. Along with “Carcassonne” I consider “The Hill,” “Black Music,” A Greening Bough, Faulkner’s letters home from New Haven and Toronto in 1918, and Sherwood Anderson’s reflection of the limping aviator in “A Meeting South.” I explore this material in relation to the letters and memoirs of “All the Dead Pilots” (1931), the American “cavalry of the clouds” who, in Flying for France (James McConnell 1917), became legendary founders of the air war myth: Raoul Lufberry, Victor Chapman, Norman Prince, Kiffin Rockwell, James McConnell, and Quentin Roosevelt.
  • “I Am Going Cold-Blooded Yankee Now”: Money, Media, and the Economic Parable in Faulkner’s Great Depression / Robert Jackson, University of Tulsa
    As a Mississippian, Faulkner saw the Great Depression’s privation firsthand, yet he also rode out the era in surprisingly comfortable financial circumstances. He began publishing short fiction in nationally distributed magazines in 1930, and in 1932 he made the first of numerous trips to Hollywood for screenwriting work. These lucrative opportunities marked him off starkly both from the under-monetized years of his earliest work and from the financial desperation besetting many of his neighbors in Oxford during the 1930s. How, then, might we account for the influence of these paradoxical economic currents in Faulkner’s “major” fiction of this period? I will explore the mutually constitutive relations among the short stories, screenwritings, and novels of the early 1930s (culminating with Absalom, Absalom! (1936), which I believe to be the most ambitious and comprehensive literary statement of Faulkner’s economic thought during this period), looking especially at how they register Faulkner’s own economic fortunes as well as the state of the world economy.
  • Pictorialism, Prolixity, and Spatial Form: Faulkner’s Post-Hollywood Racial Imaginary / Peter Lurie, University of Richmond
    Faulkner’s modernism founds its footing in the late 1920s and early ‘30s with his first great experimental novels, each of which demonstrate his use of interior monologue to meditate on Southern subjecthood and the region’s class ills. Following Sanctuary’s 1931 publishing and the first studio contract it prompted, Faulkner’s fiction altered, becoming more expansive, ambitious, and encompassing. This paper describes the broadened social and formal “scale” of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels and considers what role his encounter with the film medium played in this development. Faulkner’s work had always betrayed his interest in pictorialism. Yet as several examples suggest, such as his map of Yoknapatawpha for Absalom, Absalom!, this tendency increased and broadened across his later career. This paper uses ideas from image theory such as W. J. T. Mitchell’s “metapictures” and their suggestion of repleteness as well as Stephen Heath’s theory of the frame to suggest a relationship between Faulkner’s remunerations in Hollywood and the expanded lexical, syntactic, and formal workings in novels from Pylon to Go Down, Moses.
  • Financialization and Neoliberalism: A Snopes Genealogy / John T. Matthews, Boston University
    If The Hamlet shows Flem Snopes grasping the shift from agricultural production to finance capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century, The Town has the Snopeses take advantage of an emergent regime of financialization over the next decades. Unlike finance capitalism, in which the production of goods is underwritten by credit, financialization separates finance from nonfinancial activity. That transformation is intimated by projects in The Town that, like Montgomery Ward Snopes’s “Atelier Monty,” make money because “there aint no destructive consumption at all that’s got to be replenished at a definite production labor cost.” Writing decades into this phenomenon in the 1950s, Faulkner anticipates how financialization prepares for neoliberalism, a capitalist structure of accumulation profiting from the free movement of capital, evasion of state regulation, privatization of social services, regressive taxation, abandonment of capital-labor cooperation, and unrestrained corporate competition. Snopesism caricatures the fiction of free-market frontier entrepreneurialism neoliberalism comes to idolize.