October 22, 2021 by Staff Report
Dr. Barbara Ladd, professor of English at Emory University, will be the speaker at the Inaugural Howry Lecture in Faulkner Studies, which is sponsored by the same endowment that sponsors the professorship in Faulkner Studies, currently held by Jay Watson. The lecture will be held on Monday, October 25th at 7pm via Zoom, and aims to promote further study of William Faulkner’s work at the University of Mississippi. The title of Monday’s lecture is “Who is Charles Bon?” and will discuss race, racial classification, and the ways the assumptions of twenty-first century readers about race and identity complicate some traditional ways of reading Faulkner and race.
Ladd is an internationally recognized expert on the literature and culture of the American South, and has much experience with the work of William Faulkner, as Faulkner’s work has figured prominently in the two monographs she has published to date: Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner (LSU Press, 1996), and Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty (LSU Press, 2007). She is also the coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South and the author of dozens of scholarly essays about southern writers.
Through all of her works, Dr. Ladd aims to convey the importance of Southern literature to our society, and the importance of language in the culture of the South. “I hope it’s clear that I don’t see ‘language’ as separate from thought and feeling themselves. It is not an ornament in the work of writers like Faulkner- it is constitutive of the world they imagine,” says Ladd. She explains that Southern literature is an imperative tool when looking at the modern world, and that the themes and tone of Southern stories tend to tell the story of the past and present better than any other genre. Ladd elaborates, “Modernity, which is supposed to be light and forward-thinking, can also be dark, and heavy with histories and traditions that we are not free of. This is part of what I think Faulkner engages, that entanglement.”
Although the Howry Lecture will be virtual, Ladd looks forward to reminiscing on Oxford on Monday, and revisiting the memories she made on her first visit to Oxford in the 1970s. She’s been back since: “A few years ago, I brought some students from Emory to Oxford for a three-day visit. Their excitement lasted well after we returned to Atlanta, and I think several have visited again. The magic is still there,” says Ladd.
The magic of Oxford, she clarifies, is that of Faulkner’s Oxford- she says she recognizes Oxford’s residents for whom Oxford is their own place, apart from Faulkner, but she admits that she knows Oxford “chiefly through the stories of Faulkner’s life and through his writing.”
While Ladd understands that Oxford residents have their own connection to the place regardless of the legacy left by Faulkner, she believes that without authors and artists- without Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County- Oxford may not be what it is today.
This idea of place in the South has interested Ladd, and Oxford as a place defined by those who have written about it is a prime example. “My work insists on reading Southern literature as part of the wider world of literature and literary history in a way that recognizes the importance of both the particularities of region and place the broader worlds of literature and literary histories where Southern literature also lives,” says Ladd. “I’m not interested in the South as ‘a place apart.’”
The Inaugural Howry Lecture in Faulkner Studies will take place on October 25th at 7pm via Zoom. Scan the QR code in the graphic provided for a link to register.
This lecture is presented by the Howry Endowment and the University of Mississippi English Department.
For any questions regarding this event, contact Jay Watson.