A Faulkner and Hurston Conference will be hosted at the University Center on the campus of Southeast Missouri State University from October 23 through October 25.
The Center for Faulkner Studies holds a William Faulkner conference every two years and this year’s event will pair the well known Southern writer with Zora Neale Hurston. The idea to pair Faulkner with another author is to offer a different perspective on his work.
“Since a lot of people have been working on Faulkner for a long time and lots has been written about him, pairing him with another author is often a way to get people to consider his work differently,” said Christopher Rieger, director of the Center for Faulkner Studies.
Hurston was a African-American female author from Florida who wrote mainly in the 1930s and 1940s, the same time period during which Faulkner did most of his work.
“The idea of pairing these two together is that we’ll get two very different perspective on similar topics,” Rieger said. “Two writers who were writing on the same regions and many of the same themes, but they come from very different backgrounds.”
He said both Hurston and Faulkner wrote about rural people in small towns in the South and thinks there are a lot of interesting points of comparison between the two authors.
Rieger said three events are free and open to the public. The rest of the events require a registration fee for the general public, but all events are free for faculty and students.
The free events are the Faulkner chautauqua performance at 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 23 in the Redhawks Room, the keynote address Thursday at 7 o’clock in the UC Ballroom, and the closing reception and gallery talk at Crisp Museum at the River Campus on Saturday, October 25 at 1:00 p.m.
The keynote speaker is John Lowe, the Methvin Distinguished Professor of Southern Literature at the University of Georgia, and he will talk about the rural setting and character types that both Hurston and Faulkner use in their works. The title of his presentation is "Backwoods Modernism: The Uses of 'Primitivist' Portraiture in the Works of Faulkner and Hurston."
“He was a natural fit to keynote this conference,” said Rieger, who explained that Lowe has published several books about both authors.
The chautauqua performance called "Place, Race, and Books: A Literary Conversation with William Faulkner" will be performed by John Dennis Anderson from Emerson College in Boston.
“He will be doing sort of a monologue in character as Faulkner and taking some questions from the audience first in character as Faulkner and then out of character,” Rieger explained.
A chautauqua performance is usually a monologue performed by someone in the character of their subject and are more scholarly oriented than simple impersonations.
“It’s really a heavily researched kind of performance that is very much based in the author’s biography and work. So it will be scholarly but a different type of scholarly presentation,” Rieger said.
Besides those main events, the conference will feature panel presentations where scholars will present their work on Faulkner and Hurston. Topics such as gender, race, economics and religion in Hurston and Faulkner’s works will be discussed.
Presenters from 16 different states and three different countries will be coming to Southeast’s campus to present their work and Rieger said there will 40 different presenters .
“We have scholars coming from Japan, China and Nigeria,” Rieger said.
Throughout the conference, student artwork related to Faulkner and Hurston will be on display in the Indian Room of the University Center, which will bring an interdisciplinary aspect to the conference.
The final event of the conference will be a viewing and reception for the “Native Ground Photography Exhibition” by Robert McDonald of the Virginia Military Institute in the Crisp Museum at the River Campus. His photographs of homes of southern authors will be discussed from a literary and photography point of view by Southeast professors.