SEMO's Faulkner Center to host conference in October

Scholars from around the world soon will flock to Cape Girardeau for a conference about authors William Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston.

The conference, to be hosted in October by the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University, is held every other year, said Christopher Rieger, the center's director. This fifth edition is set for Oct. 23 through 25, mainly at the University Center. People from 15 to 20 states and four or five foreign countries usually attend, he said.

The event will host about 40 presenters, including noted Southern literature scholar John Lowe of the University of Georgia, who is scheduled to give the keynote address.

An exhibit by literary critic and photographer Robert McDonald of the Virginia Military Institute will be shown at the Crisp Museum on the River Campus starting in September, Rieger said. The compositions come from a series called "Native Ground," in which McDonald took photos of authors' homes around the South, including those of Faulkner and Hurston. He will give a gallery talk to close out the conference at the museum.

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

"We wanted to add more of an interdisciplinary element to the conference and have it not just be about literature," Rieger said.

The last conference featured Faulkner-themed art by art department faculty and students.

For the conference theme, Rieger said, previous attendees are polled to see which author they would like to see paired with Faulkner at the next gathering. Previously, Faulkner has been discussed with, for example, Mark Twain and Toni Morrison.

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

"We try to come up with a pairing that will inspire people to think about both authors and their works in different ways by putting them side by side, or by putting them together. ... That's the idea of the conference, is if we look at Faulkner's work through the prism of another author, how might we see things differently and vice versa?" Rieger said.

The Missouri Humanities Council has awarded a matching grant of $2,195 to the center in support of the conference.

The center, which opened in 1989, features the Louis Daniel Brodsky William Faulkner Collection, one of the four largest collections of Faulkner materials in the world. It includes more than 2,000 pages of manuscript materials; more than 3,000 letters; nearly 2,000 photographs; more than 1,000 pages relating to Faulkner's time in Hollywood; a collection of visual art by and related to the Nobel Prize-winning author; and a large collection of criticism devoted to Faulkner's works.

The Brodsky Collection also includes the Blotner Papers, a file of Joseph Blotner's research, interview notes, correspondence and manuscripts compiled during his work on "Faulkner: A Biography."

Faulkner himself never lived in Missouri, but his family briefly resided in the Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, area, Rieger said. He and Robert Hamblin, emeritus professor of English at Southeast and founding director of the Center for Faulkner Studies, developed a working relationship, resulting in the center at the Kent Library.

"Brodsky was a writer himself and a big Faulkner fan, so that's how we wound up with a Faulkner Center here," Rieger said.

Not being too far from Faulkner's home state, the center has seen students from the University of Mississippi working on their dissertations and using the collection as part of their research.

"We have a lot of scholars from China and Japan these days," Rieger said. "I think part of it for the Chinese scholars is that Faulkner writes about a society and a time in the South when there's a transition from a largely agricultural society to a more modern industrial society and economy.

"I think that resonates with a lot of the Chinese readers," he added.

Other Faulkner collections are at the University of Mississippi, University of Virginia and University of Texas.

"Ours is unique in that it was almost entirely collected by one person, Brodsky. None of the others were put together in that way," Rieger said.

rcampbell@semissourian.com

388-3639

Pertinent address:

1 University Plaza, Cape Girardeau, Mo.