Panel. Urban, Rural, and Ontological Economies

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

24-7-2017 10:30 AM

Description

  • Wall Street and Jefferson Square: Faulkner’s Urban and Rural Economies / Matthew J. Bolton, Seven Hills School (Ohio)
    In the wake of a divisive presidential campaign and the surprise election of Donald Trump, Faulkner’s abiding interest in the economic and cultural fault-lines between rural and urban America has gained sudden currency. Faulkner was fascinated with the principles and mechanisms underlying the exchange of goods, services, and capital between city and country. In depicting this exchange, he also depicts the preconceived notions and mutual suspicion with which many urban and rural Americans still regard each other. Nowhere is this complex economic relationship more evident than in commerce between Yoknapatawpha County and New York City. Jason Compson and V.K. Ratliff’s radically different relationships to that city illustrate Faulkner’s own concept of how rural and urban people and economies could achieve a form of rapprochement. In a year that has laid bare disparities between the two America’s, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels are a powerful lens for understanding our national past and present.
  • Faulkner’s Stores: Microfinance and Economic Power in the Postbellum South / David A. Davis, Mercer University
    After the war, Thomas Sutpen returns to his plantation and opens a store. In the postbellum South, the locus of economic power shifted from the plantation house to the store as a new system of microfinance emerged—the crop lien—that used debt to exploit agricultural laborers. In this arrangement, the merchant furnished everything necessary to produce a crop—including seed, fertilizer, tools, animals, food, medicine, and other supplies—to a share cropper or tenant farmer in exchange for a lien on the value of the crop. The crop lien system gave the merchant/landowner nearly complete economic control over the laborer. This paper examines Faulkner’s depiction of crop lien microfinance as a form of economic power in Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet, and The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner’s depiction of stores offers a cultural history of southern microfinance and economic power from the end of the Civil War to World War II, and it reveals that microfinance was a vital component of the South’s system of labor exploitation and control.
  • Mink Snopes’ Shavasana: Body and Commodity in Faulkner’s Economies of Being / Ryan Heryford
    This paper will argue for the role of bodies, both living and dead, in Faulkner’s novels as they complicated the historical transition from an economy of relation to an economy of exchange in the US South. Exploring both the racial ambiguity of characters like Thomas Sutpen, Joe Christmas, and Lucas Beauchamp, as well as moments where the bodies of characters fall into a rhetorical or mythic assembly with the earth itself, what in yogic practice is often referred to as shivasana or “corpse pose,” this paper will suggest that the bodies of Faulkner’s fiction offer a different narrative of the post-1865 US South, as a place of precarity and possibility, where communities and individuals had to redefine and re-inhabit new modes of personhood, agency, and subjectivity in an emergent open market.

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Jul 24th, 10:30 AM

Panel. Urban, Rural, and Ontological Economies

Nutt Auditorium

  • Wall Street and Jefferson Square: Faulkner’s Urban and Rural Economies / Matthew J. Bolton, Seven Hills School (Ohio)
    In the wake of a divisive presidential campaign and the surprise election of Donald Trump, Faulkner’s abiding interest in the economic and cultural fault-lines between rural and urban America has gained sudden currency. Faulkner was fascinated with the principles and mechanisms underlying the exchange of goods, services, and capital between city and country. In depicting this exchange, he also depicts the preconceived notions and mutual suspicion with which many urban and rural Americans still regard each other. Nowhere is this complex economic relationship more evident than in commerce between Yoknapatawpha County and New York City. Jason Compson and V.K. Ratliff’s radically different relationships to that city illustrate Faulkner’s own concept of how rural and urban people and economies could achieve a form of rapprochement. In a year that has laid bare disparities between the two America’s, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels are a powerful lens for understanding our national past and present.
  • Faulkner’s Stores: Microfinance and Economic Power in the Postbellum South / David A. Davis, Mercer University
    After the war, Thomas Sutpen returns to his plantation and opens a store. In the postbellum South, the locus of economic power shifted from the plantation house to the store as a new system of microfinance emerged—the crop lien—that used debt to exploit agricultural laborers. In this arrangement, the merchant furnished everything necessary to produce a crop—including seed, fertilizer, tools, animals, food, medicine, and other supplies—to a share cropper or tenant farmer in exchange for a lien on the value of the crop. The crop lien system gave the merchant/landowner nearly complete economic control over the laborer. This paper examines Faulkner’s depiction of crop lien microfinance as a form of economic power in Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet, and The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner’s depiction of stores offers a cultural history of southern microfinance and economic power from the end of the Civil War to World War II, and it reveals that microfinance was a vital component of the South’s system of labor exploitation and control.
  • Mink Snopes’ Shavasana: Body and Commodity in Faulkner’s Economies of Being / Ryan Heryford
    This paper will argue for the role of bodies, both living and dead, in Faulkner’s novels as they complicated the historical transition from an economy of relation to an economy of exchange in the US South. Exploring both the racial ambiguity of characters like Thomas Sutpen, Joe Christmas, and Lucas Beauchamp, as well as moments where the bodies of characters fall into a rhetorical or mythic assembly with the earth itself, what in yogic practice is often referred to as shivasana or “corpse pose,” this paper will suggest that the bodies of Faulkner’s fiction offer a different narrative of the post-1865 US South, as a place of precarity and possibility, where communities and individuals had to redefine and re-inhabit new modes of personhood, agency, and subjectivity in an emergent open market.