"Poor White Identity Politics: The Case of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying"

a workshop with

Jolene R. Hubbs

Thursday, February 2, 2006
CCSRE Conference Room, Building 240
4:00-6:00 PM

Respondent: Ramón Saldívar
The Hoagland Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Chair, Department of English
Stanford University

Jolene Hubbs's paper is available ahead of time. If you would like a copy of the paper, please contact Julie Minich at jminich@stanford.edu.

Abstract: While the modernism of William Faulkner's novels has received a great deal of scholarly attention, his works' representations of poor white characters have been granted much less consideration. This talk, contending that the two issues are more closely related than has been previously recognized, approaches As I Lay Dying with an eye to what it terms the novel's poor white modernism: its mutually constitutive structure in which modernist form works in the service of its poor white subject matter, and vice versa. Starting from this vantage point, the talk considers two key aspects of the novel's modernist aesthetic, its unconventional narrative structure and the ideas about language expressed in Addie's chapter, in order to demonstrate the relationship between the novel's narrative forms and the social location of its protagonists and illuminate the issues of class and identity that provide the often overlooked context for Addie's critique of language.

Jolene Hubbs is a fourth year doctoral candidate in the Department of English. She graduated summa cum laude from Scripps College with a B.A. in English and Italian and was a Thomas J. Watson Fellow in 1999-2000. Her dissertation, entitled Revolting Whiteness: Race, Class, and the American Grotesque, considers representations of poor whiteness figured as or associated with grotesquerie in canonical American literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Ramón Saldívar is the Hoagland Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of English at Stanford University. His teaching and research areas at Stanford have concentrated on the areas of cultural studies, literary theory, modernism, Chicano narrative, and post-colonial literature. He is the author of Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce (1984), Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990) and The Borderlands of Culture: Social Aesthetics and the Transnational Imaginary of Américo Paredes (2005). Saldívar has served on the Board of Governors of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, on the Editorial Board of American Literature and Modern Fiction Studies and on the national council of the American Studies Association.