Bryan, Victoria M. Fielder, Elizabeth Wilson, Charles Reagan
Description
Commodification and Faulkners Modernized Funereal Performances / Victoria M. Bryan, University of MississippiFaulkner explores differently modernized groups by illustrating their reactions to death. When Vardaman asks if his mother is going to go to the same place that all those rabbits and possums (66) went, he exhibits a closeness to death and dying than that exhibited in Reds funeral in Sanctuary in which his corpse is figured as a spectacle. In Death Drag, the mere idea of seeing a dead body creates such fear that the crowd becomes hysterical. These relationships with and reactions to death indicate a process of modernization underway in the American South. The progression of the commodification of death and the rise of the death industry in texts such as As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Death Drag force a reconsideration of the modernity of funereal practices and the resulting spectacle of the dead body. Mourning Change: Death and Loss in Go Down, Moses / Elizabeth Fielder, University of MississippiThe Old Injuns mound; shards of pottery and broken bottles; twenty-five dollars worth of flowers: Go Down, Moses is a text filled with death and burial. The bodies interred in the earth are geographically fixed, but the rituals that encompass the various mourning processes move with fluidity between larger global traditions that reveal Yoknapatawphas porosity. By focusing on the complicated relationship between Gavin Stevens and Mollie Beauchamp over her grandsons death, this paper examines funerals in Go Down, Moses as performative rituals where characters adopt and redefine...
2012 07 11 T15:00:00 Z
