The English department at the University of Mississippi is proud to host its 18th annual Southern Writers/Southern Writing Graduate Conference this July 12-14. The conference will run immediately after the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference, and will feature graduate panelists from across the United States speaking on Southern literature and film.
We are especially excited to host our plenary speaker Dr. Suzanne Marrs of Millsaps College. Dr. Marrs is Eudora Welty’s close friend and official biographer and will be speaking on the relationship between Eudora Welty and William Maxwell. Her address is entitled “Eudora Welty and William Maxwell: Writers’ Notes on Writing Fiction.”
All panels will be held in the Barnard Observatory and will be free and open to the public. Anyone who wants to attend the awards breakfast or the wine and cheese reception, though, will need to pay a small fee. Those interested should contact Victoria Bryan at vmbryan@olemiss.edu.
Help us spread the word about this exciting event, and consider dropping by for some interesting discussion!
Schedule of Presentations:
Thursday 12 July 2012
2:00-5:00 Registration—Barnard Observatory Lobby
7:00-9:30 Reception at The Blind Pig
Featuring a Creative Panel with Readings By:
Jimmy Cajoleas, University of Mississippi
Gary Sheppard, University of Mississippi
Dotty Knight, University of Mississippi
Michael Shea, University of Mississippi
Friday 13July 2012
8:00-8:30 Coffee & Breakfast—Barnard Observatory Lobby
8:45-9:15 Welcome—Barnard Observatory—Tupelo Room
Dr. Annette Trefzer, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English,
University of Mississippi
Dr. Ted Ownby, Director, Center for the Study of Southern Culture
9:30-11:00 Simultaneous Sessions
Panel 1A – Performing Race/Sexuality
Barnard Observatory, Tupelo Room
Chair: Elizabeth Fielder
“The Scenery, Spectacle, and Performance of Blackness in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and Richard Ford’s A Piece of My Heart”
Ebony McNeal, University of Mississippi
“The Eves of Destruction: Modes of Travel as Embodiments of Female Sexuality in Jonah’s Gourd Vine”
Amy Glaves, Northern Illinois University
“Performing Sexuality in Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious”
Elizabeth Fielder, University of Mississippi
Panel 1B – God, Religion, and Meaning-Making
Barnard Observatory, Room 108
Chair: Ben Lowery
“‘Stairwell to Nowhere’: Apophatic Theology in McCarthy’s Suttree”
Jay Beavers, Baylor University
“God’s Grace is Hard to Find: The Misfit as Existential Doorkeeper”
Danielle S. Ely, The College of Saint Rose
“Yoknapatawphan Scripture: Approaching Absalom, Absalom! through Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis”
Justin Ness, Northern Illinois University
11:00-1:00 Lunch on your own
1:00-2:30 Simultaneous Sessions
Panel 2A –Gender, Desire, Control
Barnard Observatory, Room 108
Chair: Alexandra Blair
“The Presence of ‘All Bodies and Nobodies’ in Jean Toomer’s Cane”
Jill Goad, Georgia State University
“Disciplining Gender in Carson McCullers’ Short Stories”
Amanda Walsh, Northern Illinois University
“‘Hongry for what you denied it’: Queer Hunger, Feeding, and Eating in Song of Solomon”
Carrie Tippen, Texas Christian University
Panel 2B – Creating Culture
Barnard Observatory, Room 109
Chair: Meredith Harper
“‘Thar’s a Sight of Things I Hate to Leave Here’: The Fading Teleology of Material Culture in James Still’s River of Earth”
Jason Hardy, University of Tennessee
“Political Discourse and Folk Music of the Confederacy”
Andrew Pearcy, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
“Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree: A Deflation of the Myth of Societal Escape”
Brandon Haynes, University of Tennessee
2:45-4:15 Simultaneous Sessions
Panel 3A – Trauma
Barnard Observatory, Tupelo Room
Chair: Bill Phillips
“Good Mourning, Deuil bonne: On Grieving, Performance and the Liminal Self”
Daniel Irving, Stony Brook University
“‘Cooked and Et’: Abjection and the Corpse in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.”
Bill Phillips, University of Mississippi
Panel 3B – Teaching as a Graduate Student: Approaches and Advice
Barnard Observatory, Room 108
Chair: Ebony McNeal
Roundtable Panelists from the University of Mississippi:
Elizabeth Fielder
Ebony McNeal
Dave Miller
LaToya Jefferson
Anne Babson
Meredith Harper
Chris O’Brien
Panel 3C – New Places, Old Spaces: Examining Themes of Place as Space and Time in the Fiction of Eudora Welty
Barnard Observatory, Room 109
Chair: Ramona Wanlass
“‘A Seething Lush Hell’: The Gendered Landscape in Delta Wedding”
Susie Penman, University of Mississippi
“Unpacking History and Uncovering Homodesire: How Welty’s Use of Historical Characters Shrouds the Appearance of Male Homosexuality in ‘The Wide Net’”
Ramona Wanlass, University of Mississippi
“No Time for You My Love: Eudora Welty and the Dissonance of Modern Temporality”
Josh Lundy, University of Mississippi
4:30-5:30 Plenary Lecture
Barnard Observatory—Tupelo Room
Introduction: Dr. Annette Trefzer, University of Mississippi
“Eudora Welty and William Maxwell: Writers’ Notes on Writing Fiction”
Dr. Suzanne Marrs, Millsaps College
6:30-8:30 Creative Panel/Wine & Cheese Reception
Off-Square Books on the Oxford Square
Readings from the prose of:
Andy Johnson, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL
Nicole Mayeux, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA
J.D. Hibbits, McNeese State, Lake Charles, LA
Allie Mariano, McNeese State, Lake Chalres, LA
Saturday 14 July 2012
8:30-10:30 Awards Breakfast at Big Bad Breakfast
Featuring a Creative Panel With Poetry Readings by:
Caroline Young, University of Georgia, Athens, GA
April Christiansen, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR
Rhonda Lott, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX
Nate Friedman, McNeese State University, Lake Charles, LA
11:00-12:30 Simultaneous Sessions
Panel 4A – Film
Barnard Observatory, Tupelo Room
Chair: Sheena Boran
“Reinventing Horrors in 20th Century Film”
J.H. Otterstrom, Northeastern State University of Oklahoma
“Whistlin’ Dixie: The Hunger Games Phenomenon as a Simplification of Southern Ethics”
Matt Spencer, Eastern Kentucky University
“Deliverance and Narrating the Place of Southern Appalachia”
Charles Knight, University of Nottingham
Panel 4B – Performing Culture/Community in Faulkner
Barnard Observatory, Room 108
Chair: Dave Miller
“A ‘rapport with the fluid cradle of events (time)’: The Role of Rosa Coldfield and ‘Women’s Time’ in Absalom, Absalom!”
Melanie Masterton, University of California Riverside
“‘What I’m interested in is the husband he seems to have had’: Queering the Community in Light in August”
Jason Zerbe, University of Mississippi
“‘The lowest thing’?: Faulkner and the New Southern Jew”
Matthew Dischinger, Louisiana State University
Panel 4C – Uncertain Narration
Barnard Observatory, Room 109
Chair: Amy K. King
“Unreliable Narration and Self-Conscious Fiction: Lee Smith’s Oral History in a New Light”
Caleb Dempsey-Richardson, Eastern Kentucky University
“Between the Gaps: Miscegenation within the Sites of Silences of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury”
Ren Denton, University of Memphis
“The Revised Belle of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Tarleton Trilogy: Identity in Revision”
Heather Fox, Virginia Commonwealth University
