Panel. Legacies of Slavery in The Sound and the Fury

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

23-7-2018 9:30 AM

Description

  • “Shut Up That Moaning”: The Racial Politics of Narration and Voice in The Sound and the Fury and Neo-Slave Narratives / Shawn Salvant, University of Connecticut
    This paper compares the literary techniques of The Sound and the Fury with the temporal strategies characterizing neo-slave narratives and considers the racial politics of chronological disjuncture. Emerging in response to historiographic elisions of African American agency and literary appropriations of black voices, the neo-slave narrative employs strategies reminiscent of the disorienting narrative strategies Faulkner uses to represent the consciousnesses of characters haunted by traumatic pasts. The racial politics of historical disjuncture in neo-slave narratives highlight the social and interracial dimensions of memory and narrative time in The Sound and the Fury.
  • Jason Compson, Untimely Slave Master / Julia Stern, Northwestern University
    Jason Compson offers a brilliant case study for Hegel’s notion that the master-slave relation depends on a mutual recognition. This dynamic, in its purest form, is infinitely reversible. Using sociologist Orlando Patterson’s lexicon of natal alienation, fictive kinship, social death, human parasitism, and ideological reversal, I consider Jason Compson’s affective and ideological affinities with slavery and his belated identification with the slave master. I discuss his brutal crafting of his niece Quentin into an abject, promiscuous, school-avoidant teen. Jason has been robbing Quentin of her mother’s child support for 17 years. Quentin absconds with the remaining portion of her rightful fortune, affording a Hegelian reversal of significant proportion. I close with a reading of Luster, Dilsey’s grandson, the unremunerated, black, 13-year-old caregiver of Ben. Luster never confronts Jason in a deliberate protest against his dehumanizing, racist, misogynous ways. But in his zeal for the show, most likely a white Dixieland band covering black jazz standards (via love and theft), we see him push back against Jason’s instrumentalizing and parasitic vision of human relations.
  • Faulkner’s Mammy: An Attempt at Stability through Historical Inaccuracy / Kenneth Estrada, Dusquesne University
    Dilsey Gibson’s resemblance to the mammy caricature of the 19th Century produces omni-directional interpretive complexities. As both nurturer and household overseer, she is—according to Faulkner himself—the entity that “holds the whole thing together with no hope of reward, except she was doing the best she could.” But does she “hold the whole thing together”? After Dilsey’s multiple unsuccessful attempts at neutralizing the Compson household chaos, do Faulkner’s words speak louder than his character’s actions? This paper explores interpretations and claims of Dilsey as a stabilizing figure in The Sound and the Fury by delving into the dissonance that exists between the antebellum mammy caricature that she evokes and her ability to “hold things together” in the Compson household. Throughout the novel, we find no instance in which Dilsey successfully effects harmony in the Compson home. Why? And, does the nature of mammy-hood have anything to do with it?

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Jul 23rd, 9:30 AM

Panel. Legacies of Slavery in The Sound and the Fury

Nutt Auditorium

  • “Shut Up That Moaning”: The Racial Politics of Narration and Voice in The Sound and the Fury and Neo-Slave Narratives / Shawn Salvant, University of Connecticut
    This paper compares the literary techniques of The Sound and the Fury with the temporal strategies characterizing neo-slave narratives and considers the racial politics of chronological disjuncture. Emerging in response to historiographic elisions of African American agency and literary appropriations of black voices, the neo-slave narrative employs strategies reminiscent of the disorienting narrative strategies Faulkner uses to represent the consciousnesses of characters haunted by traumatic pasts. The racial politics of historical disjuncture in neo-slave narratives highlight the social and interracial dimensions of memory and narrative time in The Sound and the Fury.
  • Jason Compson, Untimely Slave Master / Julia Stern, Northwestern University
    Jason Compson offers a brilliant case study for Hegel’s notion that the master-slave relation depends on a mutual recognition. This dynamic, in its purest form, is infinitely reversible. Using sociologist Orlando Patterson’s lexicon of natal alienation, fictive kinship, social death, human parasitism, and ideological reversal, I consider Jason Compson’s affective and ideological affinities with slavery and his belated identification with the slave master. I discuss his brutal crafting of his niece Quentin into an abject, promiscuous, school-avoidant teen. Jason has been robbing Quentin of her mother’s child support for 17 years. Quentin absconds with the remaining portion of her rightful fortune, affording a Hegelian reversal of significant proportion. I close with a reading of Luster, Dilsey’s grandson, the unremunerated, black, 13-year-old caregiver of Ben. Luster never confronts Jason in a deliberate protest against his dehumanizing, racist, misogynous ways. But in his zeal for the show, most likely a white Dixieland band covering black jazz standards (via love and theft), we see him push back against Jason’s instrumentalizing and parasitic vision of human relations.
  • Faulkner’s Mammy: An Attempt at Stability through Historical Inaccuracy / Kenneth Estrada, Dusquesne University
    Dilsey Gibson’s resemblance to the mammy caricature of the 19th Century produces omni-directional interpretive complexities. As both nurturer and household overseer, she is—according to Faulkner himself—the entity that “holds the whole thing together with no hope of reward, except she was doing the best she could.” But does she “hold the whole thing together”? After Dilsey’s multiple unsuccessful attempts at neutralizing the Compson household chaos, do Faulkner’s words speak louder than his character’s actions? This paper explores interpretations and claims of Dilsey as a stabilizing figure in The Sound and the Fury by delving into the dissonance that exists between the antebellum mammy caricature that she evokes and her ability to “hold things together” in the Compson household. Throughout the novel, we find no instance in which Dilsey successfully effects harmony in the Compson home. Why? And, does the nature of mammy-hood have anything to do with it?