Upcoming Events
MLA 2027: “Reckoning with Faulkner’s Civil Rights Legacy”
William Faulkner’s ouvre provides countless examples of his criticism of white supremacy. Yet, as the Civil Rights movement built momentum, Faulkner adopted a
regressive stance. We invite papers about Faulkner’s oeuvre related to civil rights.
Moderator: Rebecca S. Nisetich, University of Southern Maine
Kyle Robert Alvey, Purdue University: “Faulkner and the Limits of White Liberalism: Civil Rights, Justice, and Memory in Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust”
Adam Meehan, Palomar College: “Faulkner’s Political Unconscious: Race, Ideology, and the Limits of White Subjectivity”
Ahmed Honeini, Royal Holloway, University of London: “‘Go Slow Now,’ or Liberty Deferred:
William Faulkner, James Baldwin, and the Tyranny of White Liberalism in Blues for Mister
Charlie”
Curtis Browne, Brown University: “Movements of Race and Reading: Faulkner, Civil Rights, and
‘Pantaloon in Black’”
UT Knoxville
“Speculative Souths” Symposium
Panel Proposal: “Faulkner’s Vegetal Futures”
Knoxville, TN
June 10-12, 2027
Successful papers from this panel will be invited to submit to a special issue on Vegetal Faulkner for the Faulkner Journal.
Plants occupy a distinctive place in Faulkner’s fiction. Plants function as a kind of counternarrative that draws readers away from exclusively human dramas and toward deeper ecological histories. Plants in Faulkner are not merely part of the setting but actively participate in the production of meaning by shaping how characters perceive the world and their place within it, and teaching lessons about relationality, ethics, and adaptability.
Faulkner’s environmental imagination is similarly rooted in vegetal life. His concerns about deforestation, land depletion, and industrialization register not simply as social or economic anxieties but as threats to the plant worlds that sustain human and nonhuman communities alike. Through a multitude of plant types, including wildflowers, crops, trees, and other vegetation, Faulkner imagines futures marked by loss, regeneration, persistence, and transformation.
The William Faulkner Society invites proposals that explore how plants structure Faulkner’s speculative imagination and enable new ways of thinking about the future of both the U.S. South and the planet. We welcome papers that examine the optimistic, pessimistic, or ambivalent futures that emerge through the vegetal life within Faulkner’s fictional worlds.
Possible areas of inquiry may include how the study of plants ignite speculation about:
- Place and region
- Plant-human histories
- Multispecies encounter/relationality
- Ecological epistemologies
- Ways of redefining the “human”
- More-than-human forms of worldmaking
- Weeds, invasive species, and other discourse surrounding plants
- Faulkner and botany; Faulkner and biology
Accepted panelists are required to register membership with the William Faulkner Society to present.
