Event Schedule

Meeting Place

The conference will be held in the University Center (on Normal Avenue) on the campus of Southeast Missouri State University. Events will be held in the Ballroom, Missouriana Room, and Indian Room, all located on the third floor of the University Center.

Opening Banquet

The conference will open at 6 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 19, with a buffet dinner followed by the keynote address by Robert Brinkmeyer. Tickets to the banquet are $15, and paid reservations must be received by Oct. 1.

Keynote Address

"South x West: Faulkner and Twain at the Crossroads"
7 p.m., Thursday, October 19, University Center Ballroom (public invited, free admission)

Robert Brinkmeyer is Professor and Chair of English at the University of Arkansas. He is widely published in twentieth-century Southern literature and culture, including four books: Three Catholic Writers of the Modern South; The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor; Katherine Anne Porter's Artistic Development: Primitivism, Traditionalism, and Totalitarianism; and Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West. Currently, Professor Brinkmeyer is finishing up a study of Southern writing in the 1930s and 1940s, focusing on the impact of European fascism on Southerners' conceptions of race and culture, a project for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Papers

This conference will feature presentations by thirty-nine scholars representing six countries and thirteen American states. Topics will include Faulkner's and Twain's treatments of the river, the frontier, humor, race, class, gender, and history. There will also be papers on Faulkner and Twain in the classroom.

Faulkner/Twain Exhibit

Books, manuscripts, and other memorabilia from the Louis Daniel Brodsky Collection of William Faulkner materials and the Charles L. Harrison collection of Mark Twain books will be on exhibit throughout the conference in Kent Library, next door to the University Center. Library Dean Sarah Cron; Louis Daniel Brodsky, the Curator of the Brodsky Collection; and Dr. Lisa Speers, Special Collections Librarian, will host a special showing of the Rare Book Room from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., Friday, October 20. A reception for conference registrants will accompany that event.

"Mr. Twain, Meet Mr. Faulkner"

7:00 p.m., Friday, October 20, University Center Ballroom (public invited, free admission)

"Mr. Twain, Meet Mr. Faulkner," a readers' theater presentation based on the writings of Twain and Faulkner, is scripted and directed by Dr. Roseanna Whitlow, Instructor of Communications Studies at Southeast Missouri State University. Dr. Whitlow, a published playwright, has written and directed a number of local and regional shows, including Thistle Blossoms, The Mighty Mississippi River Melodrama, and Young Louis Lorimier.

Of her Twain/Faulkner work Dr. Whitlow says: "Spending the past many weeks making friends, or at least better acquaintance, with William Faulkner and Mark Twain has been an adventure--a sometimes joyful, sometimes sorrowful, and always too hurried journey through their writings, their lives, their rascality, and their passion for mankind."

Historical Tour

On Saturday afternoon, Oct. 21, from 1:30 to 3:30, Dr. Frank Nickell, director of Southeast Missouri State University's Center for Regional History, will conduct a bus tour of the Mississippi River riverfront and other historic sites in and around Cape Girardeau. A sign-up sheet will be available at the registration desk. Cost is $12 per person. (For those not taking the historical tour, the conference will conclude at noon on Saturday.)

Papers Presented

Below is the program of papers to be presented at the conference. 

Faulkner, Twain, and Race (8:30 a.m., Friday, Missouriana Room)

Moderator:  Harvey Hecht, Southeast Missouri State University

"To Kill a Prejudice: The Lynch Mob in Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Harper Lee"
M. Thomas Inge, Randolph-Macon College

"Huck Goes to Harvard"
Laurel E. Eason, Catawba College, Salisbury, North Carolina

"Performing Patriarchy: The Ideological Significance of Joe Christmas' Suicide"
Terri Jackson Wallace, Purdue University

Faulkner, Twain, and Literary Technique (8:30 a.m., Friday, Indian Room)

Moderator:  Debrah Raschke, Southeast Missouri State University

"A Discourse Analysis of Darl's Descent into Madness in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying"
Shannon Terry Wiley, The John Cooper School, The Woodlands, Texas

 "Land, Law, and Historicity in The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson"
Delphine Louis, University of Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle

"Rereading Faulkner at Nagano"
Didi-Ionel Cenuser, MingDao University, Taiwan

Faulkner, Twain, and History I (10:30 a.m., Friday, Missouriana Room)

Moderator:  James Bell, College of the Ozarks

"'That Doomed and Fatal Blood': The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Unvanquished"
David Monteith, University of Western Ontario

"Writing the Past: The Epic South vs. the Continental South"
Julie Kares, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

"Mark Twain and William Faulkner: Similarities in Their Serious Writings"
Jules Hojnowski, Ithaca, New York

Faulkner, Twain, and History II (10:30 a.m., Friday, Indian Room)

Moderator:  Julie Chapman, Central Missouri State University

"Joe Christmas to Jim Crow: Echoes of Minstrelsy in Light in August"
Krystal McMillen, Southern Illinois University

"Faulkner, the Nagano Seminar, and Post-War Japan in the 1950s"
Nobuaki Namiki, Senshu University, Kawasaki City, Japan

"Tangled in the Ticker Tape that 'Ravel[s] Out Into Time': As I Lay Dying and the 1929 Wall Street Crash"
Charlotte S. Grider, Missouri Western State University

Faulkner and Twain in Japan (1:30 p.m., Friday, Missouriana Room)

Organizer and Moderator:  Mary Knighton, University of Tokyo

"'I’ve got to spend half my time being a dam detective…': Faulkner, Twain, and Their 'Detectives'"
Fumiyo Hayashi, University of Tokyo

"On the Culture of Defeat: A Connecticut Yankee, Henry Grady, and Japan"
Kazuhiko Goto, Rikkyo University, Tokyo

"Simultaneous Order Reconsidered: Twain, Faulkner, and Eliot"
Takayuki Tatsumi, Keio University, Tokyo

"Swinks and Snopeses: The Germ of the 'Global Provincial' in Twain and Faulkner"
Mary A. Knighton, University of Tokyo

Faulkner and Twain in the Classroom (1:30 p.m., Friday, Indian Room)

Moderator:  Dale Haskell, Southeast Missouri State University

"Faulkner and the Engineer"
Caroline Carvill, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

"Faulkner, Twain, and the N-Word"
Richard Turner, Hamilton, Ohio

"Challenging the Icon: Teaching the Composition History of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Change Our View of Mark Twain as Literary Worker"
Michael J. Kiskis, Elmira College

Faulkner, Twain, and Humor (3:30 p.m., Friday, Missouriana Room)

Moderator:  William Frank, Southeast Missouri State University

"Plundering the Old Southwest: Twain and Faulkner as Reivers"
Leland Krauth, University of Colorado

"Twain, Faulkner, and the Humor of the Old South: Southern Narrative and the Technique of Disclosure"
Gretchen Martin, The University of Virginia’s College at Wise

"Southwestern Humorists: Twain, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and Johnson Jones Hooper"
Hamada Kassam, University of Essex

"Black Humor Characteristics in As I Lay Dying"
Kong Qinghua, Qingdao University, Shandong Province, People's Republic of China

Faulkner and Twain in Cultural Context (3:30 p.m., Friday, Indian Room)

Moderator:  Daniel Jaycox, Southeast Missouri State University

"Thomas Sutpen and Flem Snopes: The Interrelationship of Absalom, Absalom! and the Snopes Trilogy"
Richmond B. Adams, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
 
"Faulkner, Twain, and Just about Everybody Not Currently Working in Washington"
Charles A. Peek, University of Nebraska at Kearney

"Grooming and Social Hygiene: Generating a Broader, More Specific Definition of Mark Twain's Views Across Ethnic Groups"
C. Wilson Viar, III, University of Memphis

Faulkner, Twain, and World Literature (8:30 a.m., Saturday, Missouriana Room)

Moderator:  Gretchen Martin, The University of Virginia's College at Wise

"Post-death Dislocation in Moral Constructs: Faulkner, Twain, and Zola and the Dispossessed Being"
Thomas Eaton, Southeast Missouri State University

"'A man with such an appearance was capable of anything': Imaginary Rape and the Violent 'Other' in William Faulkner's 'Dry September' and Amos Oz's 'Nomad and Viper'"
Kathaleen E. Amende, Alabama State University

"Blood and the Violence of the White Fathers in Faulkner's Light in August and Carlos Fuentes' Gringo Viejo"
Emron Esplin, Michigan State University

Faulkner and Twain: The River, the South, and the World (8:30 a.m., Saturday, Indian Room)

Moderator:  Melanie Speight, Southeast Missouri State University

"The River in Twain's Life on the Mississippi and Faulkner's 'Old Man': From Unreadable Experience to Initiation"
Francoise Buisson, Universite de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, France

"The Metaphors of Gates and Doors: A Materialist Analysis of Judith Sutpen's (Dis)Embodied Sexuality"
 Aimee Berger, Texas Christian University

"Quentin Compson's Place in the World" 
Allyson LaBorde, University of Texas at Austin

Pudd'nhead Wilson's and Huck Finn's Literary Descendants (10:30 a.m., Saturday, Missouriana Room)

Moderator:  Tyler Blake, College of the Ozarks

"Can Affectation Lead to Freedom?: Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson"
Alisa M. Smith-Riel, St. Bonaventure University

"Miscegenation and Identity: Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson and Faulkner's Go Down, Moses"
Jason Cowan, Southeast Missouri State University

"Step Right Up: Spectacle and Showmanship in Pudd'nhead Wilson and The Hamlet"
Matthew Sutton, College of William and Mary

"Faulkner's Hucks and Jims"
 Robert W. Hamblin, Southeast Missouri State University

Faulkner and Twain on Native Americans and Women (10:30 a.m., Saturday, Indian Room)
 
Moderator:  Robert Zeller, Southeast Missouri State University 

"Ethnocentrism as American Essence: Mark Twain among the Indians"
C. Michael Hurst, State University New York at Buffalo

"The Ventriloquist Woman: Women Who Move Men in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!"
Stanley Weiss, Southern Illinois University

"As I Lay Birthing: Faulkner and the Maternal Birth Narrative"
Amy E.C. Linnemann, Indiana University

Note:  For those not taking the historical tour on Saturday afternoon, the conference will conclude at noon, Saturday, October 21.