Proposal

Out of my love for William Faulkner and his work As I Lay Dying, I am proposing a trip to Oxford, Mississippi to explore the setting and influences for the novel. The town of Jefferson in As I Lay Dying was modeled directly after the town of Oxford, something which the city now celebrates, priding itself to be the home of such a fabled author. In As I Lay Dying, the relationship between the old South and a new, more modern South is a prevalent theme. The Bundren family come in close contact with a new way of doing things, and they aren't quite sure what to make of it, from roads and automobiles to new teeth and gramophones. Through my journey to Oxford, I hope to connect to this theme of the novel in stops within Oxford, as well as incroporating the beauty of southern tradition, culture, food, music, and art along the way.

In my journey I want to see the places that, to this day, are celebrations or devastations of modernity sweeping through the South. I want to explore the sites and places where a new way of doing things has had, and still does have, some sort of lasting impact upon the region (whether the region knows it or not). I want to see places where people have taken a stance for, or against, the effects modernity has had upon the town. Ultimately, I want to be able to understand more of what it was like for Faulkner growing up in an area of the country that wasn't quite sure how to blend the new and the old, hoping to understand both more of what Faulkner saw and what we can see today.





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