Panel. Breeding, Feuding, and Forging Families

Location

Nutt Auditorium

Start Date

23-7-2019 9:30 AM

Description

  • Breeding Dogs, Breeding Men: Faulkner’s Search for a Hybrid Masculinity in Times of War / Isadora J. Wagner, U. S. Military Academy at West Point
    This paper contributes to genealogical studies of Faulkner’s families by tracing a lineage between Virginius MacCallum’s disastrous, hybrid “litter” of hound-fox puppies and “passel” of five sons in Faulkner’s first novel about Yoknapatawpha County, Flags in the Dust, to the McCaslin family’s more successful canine and human crossbreeds in the later novel Go Down, Moses (1942). Working with the intermediary texts “The Tall Men” (1941) and the 1946 printing of the Yoknapatawpha County map, in which Faulkner replaced the MacCallums with the McCaslins, the paper demonstrates how Flags in the Dust, written in 1926-27 in the wake of World War I, but published in 1973, inaugurates a line of hereditary questioning that Faulkner continues through breeding experiments with dogs and men into World War II to identify a hybrid masculinity that can survive the ravages of modern warfare.
  • The Lynching of Homer Barron: Feuding 'Families' in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” / Wallis Tinnie, Miami-Dade College
    In response to a critic’s comment that the likelihood of mutual love between a black man and white woman during the 1880s would be “unthinkable,“ John T. Matthews points out that the situation was less unthinkable than unthought and posits that“governing illusions” of Faulkner's Jefferson in “A Rose for Emily” have origins related to institutional slavery, illusions, Matthews submits, that have been left “unthought.” This paper examines the unthought in this Faulkner classic as it relates to the governing illusions of race and violence to secure a white democracy. The central thesis is that the “innocent” Jefferson “family” unites to murder both Emily’s father, whose name Grierson is anathema in post-Civil War Mississippi, and Homer Barron during the volatile 1870’s and 1880’s. The story's choric narrator offers partial truths, deceptive rhetoric, alternative facts and nostalgic appeals with splashes of notarial rhetoric to achieve legitimacy.
  • Family and/as Forgery: Writing Race and Gender in The Unvanquished / Jeff Allred, Hunter College/City University of New York
    We all know that Faulkner’s families are bound by talk. This paper explores the less-examined relationship between family and writing in Yoknapatawpha one finds in The Unvanquished. Woven into that text's discourse is a series of depictions of writing undertaken chiefly by subjects on the periphery of antebellum Southern society using stolen and/or repurposed materials. My paper focuses on the darkly funny gambit devised by the unlikely writing team of Rosa Millard and Ringo, an elderly white woman and an enslaved youth. Their use of stolen letterhead to forge Union Army “orders” aligns them with the emergence of modern “business communications” in the mid-nineteenth century, and I will explore the implications of this alignment, comparing their corporate mode of writing with other writerly modes present in the text. I argue that the circuitry they inhabit, so to speak, troubles the note of reactionary “redemption” that ostensibly resolves the text. Moreover, this circuitry mounts an implicit critique of populist and fascist modes of politics that links The Unvanquished with other, better-studied Faulkner texts from the 1930s.

Relational Format

Conference proceeding

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS
 
Jul 23rd, 9:30 AM

Panel. Breeding, Feuding, and Forging Families

Nutt Auditorium

  • Breeding Dogs, Breeding Men: Faulkner’s Search for a Hybrid Masculinity in Times of War / Isadora J. Wagner, U. S. Military Academy at West Point
    This paper contributes to genealogical studies of Faulkner’s families by tracing a lineage between Virginius MacCallum’s disastrous, hybrid “litter” of hound-fox puppies and “passel” of five sons in Faulkner’s first novel about Yoknapatawpha County, Flags in the Dust, to the McCaslin family’s more successful canine and human crossbreeds in the later novel Go Down, Moses (1942). Working with the intermediary texts “The Tall Men” (1941) and the 1946 printing of the Yoknapatawpha County map, in which Faulkner replaced the MacCallums with the McCaslins, the paper demonstrates how Flags in the Dust, written in 1926-27 in the wake of World War I, but published in 1973, inaugurates a line of hereditary questioning that Faulkner continues through breeding experiments with dogs and men into World War II to identify a hybrid masculinity that can survive the ravages of modern warfare.
  • The Lynching of Homer Barron: Feuding 'Families' in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” / Wallis Tinnie, Miami-Dade College
    In response to a critic’s comment that the likelihood of mutual love between a black man and white woman during the 1880s would be “unthinkable,“ John T. Matthews points out that the situation was less unthinkable than unthought and posits that“governing illusions” of Faulkner's Jefferson in “A Rose for Emily” have origins related to institutional slavery, illusions, Matthews submits, that have been left “unthought.” This paper examines the unthought in this Faulkner classic as it relates to the governing illusions of race and violence to secure a white democracy. The central thesis is that the “innocent” Jefferson “family” unites to murder both Emily’s father, whose name Grierson is anathema in post-Civil War Mississippi, and Homer Barron during the volatile 1870’s and 1880’s. The story's choric narrator offers partial truths, deceptive rhetoric, alternative facts and nostalgic appeals with splashes of notarial rhetoric to achieve legitimacy.
  • Family and/as Forgery: Writing Race and Gender in The Unvanquished / Jeff Allred, Hunter College/City University of New York
    We all know that Faulkner’s families are bound by talk. This paper explores the less-examined relationship between family and writing in Yoknapatawpha one finds in The Unvanquished. Woven into that text's discourse is a series of depictions of writing undertaken chiefly by subjects on the periphery of antebellum Southern society using stolen and/or repurposed materials. My paper focuses on the darkly funny gambit devised by the unlikely writing team of Rosa Millard and Ringo, an elderly white woman and an enslaved youth. Their use of stolen letterhead to forge Union Army “orders” aligns them with the emergence of modern “business communications” in the mid-nineteenth century, and I will explore the implications of this alignment, comparing their corporate mode of writing with other writerly modes present in the text. I argue that the circuitry they inhabit, so to speak, troubles the note of reactionary “redemption” that ostensibly resolves the text. Moreover, this circuitry mounts an implicit critique of populist and fascist modes of politics that links The Unvanquished with other, better-studied Faulkner texts from the 1930s.