Saturday,
July 19th: The day began with a flood of nerves. After waking up long
before the alarm, I sought out breakfast on the unfamiliar campus,
intending to rehearse my paper and escape the Mississippi heat over iced
coffee. Afterwards, I arrived at the conference center quite early, where my
fellow panelists chatted and rehearsed their own papers. For many of us, this
was our first time presenting our work at a conference -- the Southern Writers,
Southern Writing graduate conference proved a welcoming and inviting
introduction to the world of academic conferences. The presentations
all went smoothly and spurred stimulating questions and discussions.
Sunday,
July 20-Wednesday, July 23: The following conference, Faulkner and
Yoknapatawpha, kicked off with a catfish dinner on Faulkner's own lawn. The
three days involved copious amounts of caffeine, hours of gripping
presentations, evenings of sightseeing in town, and discussions over
dinner about research and dissertations.
Thursday,
July 24-Saturday, July 26: I returned home with new ideas and motivation for my
URSP project. I finished sifting through my notes in Joyce's Ulysses,
completing a document of passages, sorted by country, that show the
international influences upon the novel's Dublin. By Saturday, I began the same
process for Faulkner's Sound and the Fury. Both the upcoming process of
mapping these findings and the vastly international attendance at the Faulkner
conference have started to prove my initial hunch that Joyce's Dublin
and Faulkner's Mississippi are not nearly as provincial as they may seem.
