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Conference Presentations
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
Papers:
“Faulkner and the Limits of White Liberalism: Civil Rights, Justice, and Memory in Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust”
Kyle Robert Alvey,
Purdue University
“Faulkner’s Political Unconscious: Race, Ideology, and the Limits of White Subjectivity”
Adam Meehan,
Palomar College
“‘Go Slow Now,’ or Liberty Deferred: William Faulkner, James Baldwin, and the Tyranny of White Liberalism in Blues for Mister Charlie”
Ahmed Honeini,
Royal Holloway,
University of London
“Movements of Race and Reading: Faulkner, Civil Rights, and ‘Pantaloon in Black’”
Curtis Browne,
Brown University
Calls for papers
ALA 2027
Panel Proposal:
“RETROSPECTIVE AND NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE SOUND AND THE FURY“
Location
May 26-29, 2027
The Westin Copley Place
10 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02116
Publication Opportunity
Successful papers from this panel will be invited to submit to a special issue on The Sound and the Fury (SF) for the Faulkner Journal.
In recognition of the centennial of Faulkner’s perhaps best-loved and most famous novel, SF (1929), the William Faulkner Society (WFS) seeks proposals that consider the theoretical, pedagogical and/or methodological significance of SF today. While we might make the assumption that SF continues to have relevance today, this panel wants to do more to interrogate this belief. Why should we continue reading, teaching, discussing, writing about, or publishing this novel?
We are therefore interested in proposals that chart where Faulkner readers, scholars, and fans will take the discussion of this novel into the next century. What might the next hundred years of teaching and scholarship on this novel look like, and how will it differ from what came before? How might our approaches to teaching and understanding the novel change in the context of reading, learning, and thinking in the twenty-first century and beyond?
Possible avenues of inquiry could include reading the novel in conversation with:
- The (Southern) Gothic and (human) monstrosity
- New Materialism and Ecocriticism
- Plantationocene/afterlives of the plantation
- Blue Humanities
- Global Southern Studies
- Multispecies/Animal Studies
- Critical Plant Studies
Accepted panelists are required to register membership with the William Faulkner Society to present.
Instructions for Submissions:
Email presentation abstracts to the William Faulkner Society by December 30, 2026. Please include the following information in your email:
- The title of the panel, “Retrospective and New Perspectives on The Sound and the Fury” and the conference name “American Literature Association”
- A 100-word biography for the author(s)
- Any A/V requests
ALA 2027
Panel Proposal: “Vegetal Faulkner”
Location
May 26-29, 2027
The Westin Copley Place
10 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02116
Publication Opportunity
Successful papers from this panel will be invited to submit to a special issue on Vegetal Faulkner for the Faulkner Journal.
Faulkner’s depictions of plants bring his works out of the human and into a world that is even more ironically Faulknerian: the webs and networks, slow-moving temporalities, and altered perceptions associated with plant life, which prove transformative for both the character and the reader. Plants, like Faulkner’s modernist prose, warp and transform perception, opening to alternative epistemologies and realities outside the confines of Western rationalism.
This panel will examine how vegetal life actively produces Faulkner’s worlds.. Plants that appear in Faulkner’s oeuvre have histories that are inseparable from the histories of plantation agriculture, dispossession, racial capitalism, labor, and environmental transformation that shape the US South. The William Faulkner Society thus seeks proposals that attend to the material presence of plants that exist in Faulkner’s work.
Possible topics of discussion may include:
- What material entanglements between plants, people, and place become visible in Faulkner’s fiction?
- How do individual plant species unveil histories of labor, dispossession, memory, and ecological change in Yoknapatawpha and the US South more generally?
- What new forms of literary interpretation emerge when we begin with the plant rather than the human?
Accepted panelists are required to register membership with the William Faulkner Society to present.
Instructions for Submissions:
Email presentation abstracts to the William Faulkner Society by December 30, 2026. Please include the following information in your email:
- The title of the panel, “Vegetal Faulkner” and the conference name “American Literature Association”
- A 100-word biography for the author(s)
- Any A/V requests
