The final weeks of Fall 15 brought heavy and unending rain to the city of Portland. For me, I was also invested in the first half of a varsity swim season and immersed in the hydrology unit of my introductory geology class. Needless to say, there was a lot of water happening in my life.
I was also in a major figures English course on William Faulkner (Kristin Fujie) and conducting my own literary research for a term paper. As an English & Environmental Studies double major, I am acutely attuned to the portrayals of landscapes within the literature of my English classes. Faulkner was no different. Intrigued by the relationship between the water and women in Faulkner’s Southern landscapes, I explored several works of Faulkner’s early career through a formalist take on ecocriticism. Below, you can read the transcript of my presentation of this project at the 2015 Festival of Scholars at Lewis & Clark College as well as the accompanying slideshow.
Here is the written version, accompanying figures, and annotated bibliography.
Works Cited
Aiken, Charles S. “Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County: A Place in the American South.” Geographical Review 69.3 (1979): 331-348. Web.
Anderson, Eric G. “Environed Blood: Ecology and Violence in The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary.” Faulkner and the Ecology of the
South. Ed. Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2005. 30-46. Web.
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage International, 1990. Print.
—. “Nympholepsy.” Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner. Ed. Joseph Blotner. New York: Random House, 1979. 331-337. Print.
—. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage International, 1990. Print
Grant, William. “Benjy’s Branch: Symbolic Method in Part I of the Sound and the Fury”. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 13.4 (1972): 705–710. Web.
Gwin, Minrose C. “Flooding and the Feminine Text.” The Feminine and Faulkner: Reading (Beyond) Sexual Difference. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990. 122-152. Print.
Marshak, Stephen. Earth: Portrait of a Planet. 4th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. 584-585. Print.
Parrish, Susan Scott. “As I Lay Dying and the Modern Aesthetics of Ecological Crisis.” The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. Ed. John T Matthews. Cambridge University Press, 2015. 74-91. Print.
Sherry, Charles. “Being Otherwise: Nature, History, and Tragedy in Absalom, Absalom!” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 45.3 (1989): 47–76. CrossRef. Web.