Humanism, Faulkner, and the Digital

Abstract

476 Mississippi Quarterly Faulkner’s story. Certainly narrative style is a crucial element that is unique to an author, but this project demonstrates to students other literary elements that are lost in converting Faulkner’s narrative to data. As a final suggestion, I’ve learned that the best way for students to develop an understanding and appreciation for the project is to assign teams to a novel and employ the same process DY editors use to map characters, locations, and some major events. Then using Google Maps, they map the novel according to parameters they defined to create a visual representation of the novel. Specifically, their map must support a clear interpretive thesis for their presentation. The results can vary. Some groups map the bare minimum and don’t have a clear thesis. But the standouts produce unique and engaging visual representations and arguments built on useful data gleaned from the text. Students then return to DY and analyze the data to deepen their understanding of Faulkner’s work. Overall,theDY. projectanddatabasecontainsawealthofinformation useful to students and teachers, but introduction, context, and instruction are needed to effectively use it in the classroom. The project unifies Faulkner’s fragmented texts into cohesive, chronological, and somewhatomniscientnarrativesthatchangethereadingexperience.Yet Digital Yoknapatawpha can never replace Faulkner’s texts. As one student recently complained, the project raises more questions than answers, forcing him to return to the text to understand the project and the data. This is perhaps the project’s greatest pedagogical benefit: it demands thoughtful integration with the primary source material, not a turn away from it. Humanism, Faulkner, and the Digital Taylor Hagood Florida Atlantic University FROM THE MOMENT IFIRST ENCOUNTERED THE DIGITALYOKNAPATAWPHA project at an MLA presentation, I was fascinated with its innovative and dynamic qualities. Watching Stephen Railton demonstrate the ways the locations of events bloomed on a map in the form of heat spots struck me as something richly new, and I immediately realized that this project was fueled by an intellect that sought a freshness which seemed, to me, true 477 Digital Yoknapatawpha to the kind of experimentation Faulkner himself brought to his greatest writings. It was apparent to me then as it is now several years later that this inchoate website represents one of the next steps in Faulkner studies, a step that has the potential to change the field forever. I signed up to be a collaborator on the development of the project at the end of that MLA session. It was not long until I was teamed up with a partner, Steven Knepper, to create the data that would generate a map for “Barn Burning.” The first step was to reread the story in a completely new way, and oh what kind of a reading this required. I found myself undertaking a type of close reading so intricate it would surely have made Cleanth Brooks proud. I was forced to think about where things might have happened in the landscape of Faulkner’s imagination, and this endeavor created a strange kind of anxiety for me. I had made a somewhat granular examination of space and place in Faulkner in my book, Faulkner’s Imperialism, so I was comfortable with the fluid and often near-miss alignmentofFaulkner’simaginedMississippiwiththe“real”onehelived in. My argument had been that Faulkner layered his places in a palimpsest of mythic spaces that the literal land of Mississippi itself not only bore but was itself shaped by, even if it was marked by what Faulkner refers to in The Unvanquished as the “passive recalcitrance of topography” (3). When hearing about the project’s intention to generate maps that illustrate the way even the landscape itself of Faulkner’s Mississippi shifted and altered, I well understood that the connections between imagined soil and literal soil were powerfully reciprocal. Now that I was working with this project I had a chance to translate the sometimes, if not often, looseness of theorization into a (hyper)real space that in its virtual ontology would seem to permit a kind of “nonrealness” not so easily attainable when walking the streets of Oxford, Mississippi. In a way I was correct in thinking I had such a chance, but I quickly...