Deadline for submissions: March 12, 2017
Full name /name of organization: William Faulkner Society
Contact email: wfsociety@gmail.com
2018 Modern Language Associaton Convention
New York, NY, Jan. 4-7, 2018
The William Faulkner Society will take advantage of the convention location to hold a guaranteed session on the significance of New York City in William Faulkner’s life and work. Faulkner’s self-fashioning as a country mouse from the Mississippi hills belied his periodic turns as a city slicker in New York and other cosmopolitan locales. Faulkner maintained close ties to editors and friends in the city and had a variety of encounters with the literati and other bohemian circles. New York also makes appearances in Faulkner’s fiction—in some instances as an actual setting or destination, in others as a remote but powerful source of cultural and economic influence. From Jason Compson’s stock market debacle in The Sound and the Fury to Linda Snopes Kohl’s radical time as a New Yorker in The Mansion, the presence of the city is felt in Faulkner’s fictional domain. For all of these reasons and more, William Faulkner’s New York is a destination well worth revisiting and exploring. Send a 300-word abstract and brief bio by March 12, 2017, to Ted Atkinson (wfsociety@gmail.com).