Literary conference is expected to be international draw

Performance and scholarship will be featured during Southeast Missouri State University's Faulkner & Hurston Conference from Thursday through Saturday. Held mainly at the University Center, the conference is expected to attract about 250 people, including presenters from all over the world, to discuss Southern writers William Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston.

John Dennis Anderson, an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Emerson College in Boston, will perform as Faulkner, and John Lowe, an internationally recognized scholar in ethnic American and Southern literature at the University of Georgia in Athens, will be the keynote speaker.

Along with Faulkner, Anderson regularly performs as Henry James, Lynn Riggs, Washington Irving and Robert Frost. Originally from Waco, Texas, he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at Baylor University and his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin. His degrees from Baylor are in oral communication and his Ph.D. is in speech communication/performance of literature.

Anderson said he began doing humanities performances in 1994 in Oklahoma, when he portrayed James. He appeared as Faulkner -- his favorite -- the following year.

He was first drawn to Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," which Anderson said is still the work he likes best.

"The intensity and the vividness of [Faulkner's] writing is really masterful," Anderson said. "Growing up in Texas, I'm not a deep Southerner, but East Texas is still very much Southern in its culture and history."

The emphasis in chautauqua performance -- what he'll be doing at Southeast -- is not so much about resembling the character as steeping oneself in primary source documents.

"Ideally, everything you say is foot-notable to an extent, so it's a form of embodied scholarship. ... You try to be as knowledgeable as possible so you can answer questions in character, so you engage the audience in a conversation. The answering of the questions is as important ... as the prepared monologue."

Lowe's presentation is titled "Backwoods Modernism: The Uses of 'Primitivist' Portraiture in the Works of Faulkner and Hurston."

"I know pretty much everything about Hurston and as much as a lot of people do about Faulkner, so I guess I was a natural person to be the keynote for this conference," Lowe said.

Hurston penned four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays and essays. Her best-known novel is "Their Eyes Were Watching God."

Lowe is the Barbara Methvin Distinguished Professor of Southern Literature at the University of Georgia. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, a master's in English from Georgia State University in Atlanta and a master of philosophy and doctorate in English and comparative literature from Columbia University in New York.

He said the conference is shaping up to be impressive.

"I think it's going to be great. They've attracted some very bright scholars, particularly some young scholars that I'm interested in," Lowe said. He added the way the university is presenting Faulkner in combination with Hurston is a "very exciting way to reinvigorate what used to be this kind of focused reading in isolation of a given literary master. I think it creates a whole new set of perceptions."

For the conference theme, Rieger has said, previous attendees are polled to see which author they would like to see paired with Faulkner at the next gathering.

Some are contemporaries of Faulkner, from a similar geographic region, and write about similar topics or also use experimental narrative forms, Rieger said.

Held every two years, this year's event also will include presenters from around the world, plus graduate students from Southeast Missouri State University. The Center for Faulkner Studies is sponsoring the program in partnership with the Missouri Humanities Council and with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

rcampbell@semissourian.com

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