Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century

Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series

by Robert W. Hamblin (Editor), Ann J. Abadie (Editor)

Where will the study of William Faulkner's writings take scholars in the new century? What critical roads remain unexplored? "Faulkner in the Twenty-first Century" presents the thoughts of ten noted Faulkner scholars who spoke at the twenty-seventh annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi. Theresa M. Towner attacks the traditional classification of Faulkner's works as major and minor and argues that this causes the neglect of other significant works and characters. Michael Kreyling uses photographs of Faulkner to analyze the interrelationships of Faulkner's texts with the politics and culture of Mississippi. Barbara Ladd and Deborah Cohn invoke the relevance of Faulkner's works to the other South, postcolonial Latin America. Also approaching Faulkner from a postcolonial perspective, Annette Trefzer looks at his contradictory treatment of Native Americans. Within the tragic fates of such characters as Quentin Compson, Gail Hightower, and Rosa Coldfield, Leigh Ann Duck finds an inability to cope with painful memories. Patrick O'Donnell examines the use of the future tense and Faulkner's growing skepticism of history as a linear progression. To postmodern critics who denigrate The Fire and the Hearth, Karl F. Zender offers a rebuttal. Walter Benn Michaels contends that in Faulkner's South, and indeed the United States as a whole, the question of racial identification tends to overpower all other issues. Faulkner's recurring interest in frontier life and values inspires Robert W. Hamblin's piece. Robert W. Hamblin is a professor of English and the director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University. Ann J. Abadie is associate director at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.

200 pages, ebook

First published January 23, 2003

About the author

Hamblin grew up in Brice's Cross Roads. He attended Baldwyn, Mississippi public schools and graduated from Booneville High School. After attending Northeast Mississippi Community College, he graduated from Delta State University in 1960 with a bachelor's degree in English education. He went on to gain his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Mississippi in 1965 and 1976, respectively.

Hamblin entered the teaching profession at Sparrows Point High School in Baltimore County, Maryland, where he taught English and coached baseball. He began teaching at Southeast Missouri State in 1965 and became the founding director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at the university in 1989.

His interest in Faulkner began when Hamblin was in graduate school. As integration occurred at the University of Mississippi, "Faulkner helped me," he said, through the author's treatment of "racial justice, equality and brotherhood and atoning for the sins of the past." Both his master's thesis and his doctoral dissertation focused on topics related to Faulkner.

In addition to Hamblin's classroom teaching, he led seminars for the Missouri Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities and lectured and led seminars about Faulkner across the United States and in China, England, Japan, the Netherlands, Romania, and Taiwan. In 2005, he was the leader of Oprah's Book Club's online discussion of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. The study was part of Oprah Winfrey's Summer of Faulkner. He also edited a newsletter focused on teaching the writings of Faulkner in secondary- and university-level classes and published a variety of works about the author, including Myself & the World: A Biography of William Faulkner.

In addition to his writings about Faulkner, Hamblin's published works cover a variety of topics, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He served as poetry editor for a journal about sports literature and was associate editor of a poetry magazine.

He is married to Kaye Hamblin

- Wikipedia