Proposal

For this project, I intend to travel to Oxford, Mississippi. The longtime home of William Faulkner, Oxford promises an illuminating insight into Southern culture and Southern literature. There, I hope to examine the relationship between literature and place, between biography and fiction. As I drive through the South, and as I wander through Oxford, I will be looking for connections between what I see and the prominent themes of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

            Faulkner’s great novel, the story of a journey far more harrowing than I hope mine will be, reflects upon Southern anxieties about modernity and tradition. As the long-suffering Bundren family travels towards the city of Jefferson, they form a complex relationship with social and technological progress. Their literal journey from country to city takes on a kind of allegorical significance, whereby Faulkner and his protagonists observe the possibility, the temptations, and the dangers of abandoning rural, agrarian traditionalism in favor of urban vigor and technological growth. The eases and modern comforts of Jefferson seduce the Bundrens, but this seduction is costly and complicated. A phonograph delights Cash, and Anse is pleased to receive a set of dentures; as the novel ends, Faulkner’s language seems to suggest that the Bundrens’ life in Jefferson will be pleasing and comfortable. Yet the promise of a lush modern life seems to be a crucial cause behind Darl’s mounting insanity; where medical science brings comfort to Anse, it becomes the key instrument in an unscrupulous pharmacist’s deception and sexual exploitation of Dewey Dell. The benefits of modernity, often superficial, mask an anxiety about change, about the loss of contact with tradition, and indeed with nature itself.

            With this in mind, I intend to look for signs of the relationship between tradition and modernity in the South as I experience it during this trip. The underlying theme of my journey will be progress, its temptations and its dangers. As I travel to and in Oxford, I will visit centers of learning, research, and technological growth, while keeping an eye on signs of an enduring and distinctly “Southern” tradition. I hope to understand how the South stands in relation to modernity, to see what tensions still exist between the old and the new. What does it mean for the South to embrace modernity? How does the modern interact with the “traditionally” Southern?