Faulkner's Sexualities by Annette Trefzer, Ann J. Abadie

William Faulkner grew up and began his writing career during a time of great cultural upheaval, especially in the realm of sexuality, where every normative notion of identity and relationship was being re-examined. Not only does Faulkner explore multiple versions of sexuality throughout his work, but he also studies the sexual dimension of various social, economic, and aesthetic concerns.

In Faulkner's Sexualities, contributors query Faulkner's life and fiction in terms of sexual identity, sexual politics, and the ways in which such concerns affect his aesthetics. Given the frequent play with sexual norms and practices, how does Faulkner's fiction constitute the sexual subject in relation to the dynamics of the body, language, and culture? In what ways does Faulkner participate in discourses of masculinity and femininity, desire and reproduction, heterosexuality and homosexuality? In what ways are these discourses bound up with representations of race and ethnicity, modernity and ideology, region and nation? In what ways do his texts touch on questions concerning the racialization of categories of gender within colonial and dominant metropolitan discourses and power relations? Is there a southern sexuality? This volume wrestles with these questions and relates them to theories of race, gender, and sexuality.

Contributors:

John N. Duvall is professor of English at Purdue University and editor
of Modern Fiction Studies. He is the author of Faulkner’s Marginal
Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities, The Identifying
Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern
Blackness, Don DeLillo’s “Underworld,” and Race and White Identity in
Southern Fiction: From Faulkner to Morrison.

Kristin Fujie is a doctoral candidate in the department of English at the
University of California at Berkeley. She is currently writing her doctoral
dissertation on the interrelation of race and gender in Faulkner’s novels
from Soldiers’ Pay to Absalom, Absalom!

Caroline Garnier received her doctorate from Emory University in
2002, with a dissertation on women and trauma in William Faulkner’s
novels. After teaching at Morehouse College for six years, she moved
back to France and created a translation, interpreting, and ESL training
company. She recently completed several entries to be published in the
forthcoming Richard Wright Encyclopedia and is working on the publication
of letters to and from five nineteenth-century French authors.

Jaime Harker is associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi.
She is the author of America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels,
Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars and coeditor
of The Oprah Effect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club.

Catherine Gunther Kodat, professor at Hamilton College, has published
widely in the areas of narrative theory, film, and dance, as well as
on such writers as Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Allen
Tate, and Toni Morrison. She is completing an interdisciplinary study,
“Don’t Act: Rediscovering Cold War Culture.”

Peter Lurie is assistant professor English at the University of Richmond.
He is the author of Vision’s Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular
Imagination as well as essays and reviews on Faulkner, Hart Crane,
Cormac McCarthy, and film. His current research project is entitled
“American Obscurantism: History and the Visual in American Literature
and Film.”

Deborah E. McDowell is Alice Griffin Professor of American Literature
and director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of
Virginia. She is the author of “The Changing Same”: Studies in Fiction
by Black Women and Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin. A period
editor of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, she has
also edited or coedited five volumes of fiction and literary study, including
Slavery and the Literary Imagination and Nella Larsen: Quicksand
and Passing. She served as founding editor of the Black Women Writers
Series, published by Beacon Press.

Gary Richards is assistant professor of English, Linguistics, and Communication
at the University of Mary Washington. He is the author of
Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936–1961,
named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2005.

Annette Trefzer is associate professor of English at the University of
Mississippi. She is the author of Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology
of Southern Fiction and coeditor of Reclaiming Native American Identities;
Global Faulkner: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2007; and “Global
Contexts, Local Literatures: The New Southern Studies,” a special issue
of American Literature.

Michael Wainwright received his Ph.D. from Royal Holloway, University
of London in 2005, with a dissertation entitled “Faulkner, Evolution,
and the American South.” He is the author of Darwin and Faulkner’s
Novels: Evolution and Southern Literature and a forthcoming volume
entitled Toward a Dawkinsian Hermeneutic: Essays on Literature and
Genetics. He is currently a visiting lecturer at Staffordshire University.

Michael Zeitlin is associate professor of English at the University of
British Columbia and has coedited eight issues of the Faulkner Journal.
He has published thirty essays in journals and books on such figures
as Faulkner, Joyce, Melville, Donald Barthelme, Freud, and Lacan,
and is coeditor of the volume Soldier Talk: The Vietnam War in Oral
Narrative.