GCSU to revisit the works of Flannery and Faulkner

     “The Stories of Flannery and Faulkner” literary conference began on Wednesday April 2, and will be held through Saturday Aprirl 5, at GCSU.
     Co-Directors for the conference are Dr. John D. Cox, associate professor of English and Dr. Marshall Bruce Gentry, professor of English and editor of the Flannery O’Connor Review.
     Wednesday marked the beginning of the conference, with more than 100 scholars and students, many traveling across the country, to participate in this week’s event.
     Scholars from across the country are presenting papers concerning both O’Connor and William Faulkner.
     Dr. Martin Lammon, GCSU Fuller E. Callaway/Flannery O’Connor chair in creative writing and editor of Arts & Letters, as well as 2000 National Teachers Hall of Famer, Sandra Worsham of Milledgeville gave readings Wednesday in the Arts and Sciences Auditorium.
     The conference is also pleased to welcome four Georgia Southern University students, W. Jesse Ogden, Jenna Jones, Jessica Smith and Jamie Meyer, who will deliver their papers Thursday afternoon on O’Connor in the Arts and Sciences Auditorium.
     A reception was also held, Thursday afternoon, at Andalusia, the home of O’Connor. Dr. Elaine E. Whitaker, chair of the  Department of English, Speech and Jounalism, GCSU, introduced Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), who offered remarks to guests at 4:15 p.m.    He was accompanied by Jon Parrish Peede, counselor to the chairman of the NEA, as well as co-editor of the recent book,  “Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction.”
     Dr. Barry Moser, artist of the Flannery/Faulkner conference logo, held a book signing at the conference bookstore on  Thursday. In 1983, Moser won the National Book Award for design and illustration for his edition of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”
     An evening reading session by Alice Friman, poet-in-residence, GCSU, as well as keynote speaker, Dr. Jay  Watson, associate professor of English, University of Mississippi, was held Thursday evening in the Arts and Sciences Auditorium. Friman is the author of eight collections of poetry including her most recent, “The Book of the Rotten Daughter.” She has won many awards including residencies at Yaddo and Macdowell. Watson, a scholar of Southern literature and culture and Faulkner, presented his lecture:     “Faulkner and Flannery: Two Case Histories in the Aesthetics, Psychology and Economics of the Twentieth-Century American Short Story.”
     Friday morning will begin, in the Arts and Sciences Auditorium, with participants from the July 2007 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) O’Connor Institute, in which panelists from nine colleges and universities will participate in a discussion on “Teaching the Stories of O’Connor.”
     GCSU students’ paper presentations will be delivered Friday and Saturday by Ashleigh Eisinger, MFA student; Susan Presley, MA student; Scott Daniel, MA student. Victoria Kennefick, Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) student, University College, Cork (Ireland), will also present.
     A book signing by Dr. Sarah Gordon, GCSU, and Craig R. Amason, executive director of the Flannery O’Connor- Andalusia Foundation, Inc., will be held in the Conference Bookstore for their recently published book, “A Literary Guide to Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia.”
     Late Friday afternoon will give way to the award ceremony as well as readings by GCSU Creative Writing Students. Milledgeville native and contest judge Sean Hill will read from his new book, “Blood Ties & Brown Liquor,” published by the University of Georgia Press in January.
     In 2003, Hill was awarded the Michener Fellowship for poetry from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. He has also been awarded many other fellowships. His poems have appeared in many literary journals and several anthologies.
     Author Allan Gurganus, best known for his 1984 debut novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, will give a reading Friday evening.
     Gurganus has been awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has works included in the O’Henry Prize Collection, as well as the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.
     Keynote lecturer, Anne Goodwyn Jones will deliver a lecture, following Gurganus, entitled “The Burden of Southern History?: Flannery, Faulkner, and the Civil War.”
     Alongside the scholarly presentation will be a reading by Mary Hood, who won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Southern Review/Louisiana State University Short Fiction Award for her collection of stories “How Far She Went.    “Since then, Hood has won many other awards, and has been named writer-in-residence at Berry College (1997-1998) and at Reinhardt College (2001).
     The conference will conclude Saturday evening with a performance by The Okratones, an acoustic trio from  Mississippi. The Okratones will play, among their peices, original compositions. Band members include Cecil Abels,   Wendell Haag and Kevin Guyer. Presented by the Flannery O’Connor Review, GCSU School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Wright Banks Realty, the band will begin their concert on the Front Campus of GCSU at 8:30 p.m.
     Ellen Chudkosky, an English professor from South Carolina, has been enjoying her time in Milledgeville, even coming a day early to visit Andalusia.
     “(I’ve been) working it in between the lectures, of course wanting to see as much to have to do with Flannery as possible,” Chudkosky said.
     Chudkosky said she is “humbled and grateful” for her appointment Thursday afternoon with Special Collection in which she will be allowed to view manuscripts of O’Connor.
Louis Palmer, a professor of English from Castleton State College in Castleton, Vt., has also found the conference to be interesting.
“I have been wanting to come to one of these for years,” Palmer said. “I’m looking forward to going out to Andalusia.”
     “The Stories of Flannery and Faulkner” literary conference is made possible with the support of Arts Unlimited, the Flannery O’Connor-Andalusia Foundation, Inc., the Flannery O’Connor Review, the GCSU Creative Writing Program, the GCSU   Department of English, Speech and Journalism, the GCSU Library, and the Georgia Humanities Council. Also, special thanks to Savario Spencer, video support specialist, GCSU, for his contribution to the conference.
     For more information concerning literary conference, please contact co-directors Dr. John D. Cox, john.cox@gcsu.edu, Dr.  Marshall Bruce Gentry, bruce.gentry@gcsu.edu, or D. Michael Nifong, michael.nifong@gcsu.edu, or visit the website at http://www.gcsu.edu/FlanneryandFaulkner.

‘The Stories of Flannery and Faulkner,’ Saturday, April 5

9 a.m. – 10:15 a.m.
Papers, Arts and Sciences Auditorium
Andy Oler, Indiana
University
Scott Daniel, GCSU
Teresa Caruso, Pennsylvania State University-Erie

10:30 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.
Papers, Arts and Sciences Auditorium
Sherri Allred, Clemson University
Doug Davis, Gordon College
William Monroe, University of Houston
 
1:15 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Papers, Arts and Sciences Auditorium
John Sykes, Wingate University
Ralph C. Wood, Baylor University
Henry T. Edmondson, III, GCSU

2:40 p.m. – 4:10 p.m.
Paper and Film, Museum Education Room
Randall Wilhelm, University of Tennessee
Margaret Whitt, University of Denver

4:20 p.m. – 5:20 p.m.
Reading by Mary Hood, Arts and Sciences Auditorium, Introduction by Martin Lammon, GCSU

7:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Film, Museum Education Room
Film Screening of The Comforts of Home (free and open to the public)
Introduction by Avis Hewitt, Grand Valley State University.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Apr 4 2008. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry