Clarke, Deborah McCann, Sean Clark, Rebecca B.

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Unpacking Faulknerian Technology: Cars, History, and the South / Deborah Clarke, Arizona State UniversityThe relationship between history and technology in Faulkners work is vexed and inconsistent; this paper will explore how Faulkner positions the history of automobile technology, production, and marketing against Southern history. The technology of automobility creates a South both geographically connected to the rest of the nation and resistant, a South in which the uneasiness surrounding the physical bodygrounded in a history which deemed some bodies less humanfinds a modern twist in automotive technology. The automobile problematizes Southern identity in a way that acknowledges place, history, diversity, and modernity, a matrix so complex that it takes a Faulkner to begin to unpack it. Faulkner's Debt / Sean McCannThis paper considers Faulkners postwar fiction, focusing especially on A Fable and Requiem for a Nun, to consider the roles that competing concepts of debt, sin, and crime play in the narratives of civic genesis (Don Doyle) Faulkner crafted in this stage of his career. This paper will focus in particular on Faulkners references to the alleged antebellum criminal mastermind John Murrell in the making of Yoknapatawpha. The paper will argue that Murrells roleat once crucial and marginal--illuminates both fundamental contradictions in the historical origins of Faulkners world and in the moral drama Faulkner attempted to construct for the mid-twentieth-century United States. In particular, Murrells legend highlights the potential conflict between white supremacy and property rights, and the allied languages of morality and legality, in both the founding of Yoknapatawpha...

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