Calls for Papers
Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2025
“Faulkner’s Bodies”
July 20-24, 2025 — University of Mississippi
Critics have long recognized William Faulkner as one of twentieth-century literature’s foremost students and chroniclers of the vicissitudes and viscerality of embodiment, in both human and nonhuman forms. There’s still much to be said, however, about the role of “the” body in his imagination and work: characters rendered in strikingly embodied terms; recurring scenes of bodily extremity and damage; narrative immersions in perception and affect; the often violent inscription of identity, difference, and other modalities of meaning on bodies; not to mention the writer’s own complex embodiments of literary authorship. We will take up such questions and more at the fifty-first annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference, over five days of keynote lectures and readings, academic panels, teaching sessions, exhibits, tours, and other activities.
Topics could include, but are not at all limited to:
- the authorial body: images, performances, physical conditions, textual traces
- representing embodiment: style, technique, narrative, lexicon
- the body in Faulkner’s visual art: drawings, sketches, illustrations
- readerly bodies: the somatics of response and reception • infirm bodies: diseased, disabled, debilitated, aging, injured, invalid
- monstrous bodies: gothic, grotesque, carnivalesque
- dead or “dying” bodies: corpses, cadavers, carcasses, remains
- trauma studies approaches to embodiment and representation
- interspecies embodiment or other forms of transcorporeality
- animal and vegetal bodies/embodiment in Faulkner
- Faulknerian anatomy
- embodied memory
- posthuman embodiment: prostheses, cyborgs, machines
- bodies and/as identities: racialized, gendered, sexed, sexualized, queered, classed
- the body and/in consciousness: perception, emotion, affect, interoception
- embodied states, experiences, extremes: hunger, desire, pregnancy, pain, sleep, nausea, orgasm, etc. • cognitive approaches to Faulknerian textuality and narrative
- Faulknerian disembodiment: as ideal, as aspiration, as fate or doom
Comparative approaches to Faulkner’s work are welcome. We especially encourage full panel proposals for 60-minute conference sessions. Such proposals should include a one-page overview of the session topic or theme, followed by 400-500-word abstracts for each of the panel papers to be included. We also welcome individually submitted 400-500-word abstracts for 15-20-minute panel papers. Panel papers consist of approximately 2,500 words and will be considered by the conference program committee for possible expansion and inclusion in the conference volume published by the University Press of Mississippi.
Session proposals and panel paper abstracts must be submitted by January 31, 2025. All manuscripts, proposals, abstracts, and inquiries should be addressed to Jay Watson, Department of English, C-135 Bondurant Hall, University of Mississippi, P.O. Box 1848, University, MS 38677-1848. E-mail: jwatson@olemiss.edu. Decisions for all submissions will be made by March 15, 2025.