Graduate Student, School of American Studies
Thesis Title: The Mansion, or How the South was Built: Ruin, Restoration, and the Fictional Architecture of William Faulkner
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Dr. Thomas Ruys Smith
Dr. Sarah Garland |
About
My doctorial thesis focuses on the idea of the plantation mansion as "southern synecdoche" - as symbolic and physical space that has been central to how the American South has been "built" in the cultural, and especially literary, imagination.
My central argument is that the literature of William Faulkner set in his fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, emerges above all from a consciousness of the importance of the iconic plantation as a site of power discourses that have a profound impact on politics and social structure, subjective identities and Southern narrative forms. I read Faulkner's treatment of the plantation and/or plantation mansion as in many ways exemplary rather than exceptional, and as centering on both cultural and literary applications of the resonant ideas of loss and retention, of ruin, restoration, and resistance. My thesis takes an inter-disciplinary approach, drawing on scholarly fields including visual culture, architectural theory, southern studies, and tourism studies, and on the theorization of trash, waste, and ruins.
Other research interests include comics and graphic novels, contemporary television, the works of filmmakers Harmony Korine and Lars von Trier, and literary and southern studies in general.
