January 29^th and 30^th, 2021, online via Zoom

With keynote addresses by:

Dr Phillip Gordon (author of Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond [University Press of Mississippi, 2019])

and

Dr Julie Beth Napolin (author of The Facts of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form [Fordham University Press, 2020])

William Faulkner (1897-1962) has long been considered one of the foremost modernist authors to emerge from the United States. Faulkner’s authorial obsessions have typically been described as including time, history, and the fraught definition of “Southernness” in the aftermath of the Civil War, emancipation, and the quest for Civil Rights. However, starting with the publication of the edited volume Faulkner and Postmodernism (1997), critics have sought to recontextualise Faulkner as a “postmodernist” and even “transgressive” author, whose work explores the darker side of humanity and sets a precedent for writers including William S. Burroughs and Cormac McCarthy to explore the nature of sexuality, racial identity, violence, and much more. This conference builds upon these developing scholarly concerns, working to show that Faulkner is no mere regional or even traditionally modernist author who is fixated solely upon his “postage stamp of native soil.”