Describe your current project and its goal. My current book project is tentatively titled “William Faulkner’s Black Muses: The African American Authors Who shaped His Art.” In this work, I argue that the African American literary tradition had an extensive and direct influence on William Faulkner’s fiction throughout his career and that this influence has gone unrecognized in generations of scholarly work. Specifically, this monograph project examines Faulkner’s prose from his early fiction of the 1920s through his novels of the 1940s and traces the textual influence of Charles Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright. This study attempts to redefine canonical relationships between black and white authors in the American literary tradition. The canonical expansion of American literature in the last four decades has resulted in a general, if not universal, acknowledgement that African American (as well as female and other minority) voices are essential to understanding American literary and cultural history. My research addresses a neglected but important aspect of these developments in literary studies. While numerous scholars have explored white literary influence on African American literature, far fewer efforts have been made to explore the African American literary influence on white authors. What is it that interests you most about this project? Faulkner is arguably the most impactful American author of the twentieth century. Establishing the African American literary influence on his art can serve as a model for rethinking patterns of influence in American literature more broadly. Instead of thinking largely in terms of how black authors respond to white writers, we should be considering the mutual intellectual and artistic exchange between white and black authors that is at the heart of the most important literature about race in America. What is your favorite piece of literature and why? That’s a tough question, as I have many favorites and they shift all the time. For the sake of argument though, I will go with Virginia Woolf ’s classic “To the Lighthouse.” I am teaching it right now in my Modern and Contemporary Fiction course. The book is an exquisite piece of art that is largely centered on a couple of days in the life of a family. There is limited action in the traditional sense, yet Woolf ’s novel is a terrifying struggle with the brevity and fragility of life. Through her artistry, she takes on the very grand task of trying to construct some form of order, stability, and meaning out of a chaotic world. It is an almost impossible undertaking, but she pulls it off somehow. 21 www.lycoming.edu
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTA3NDk=