“That Strange Threshold”: Faulkner’s Doorways to Being

Delivered on February 17, 2016 at the University of Rhode Island, this presentation is the result of winning the URI Center for the Humanities Graduate Research Grant. I used the funding to study architecture and archives at the University of Mississippi and in the town of Oxford in July of 2015. In my talk, I explore how William Faulkner’s novel proposes an architectural and choreographic phenomenology that dramatizes and rehearses our lived experiences with doorways. Faulkner emblematizes the motion of the body in relation to an enveloping built world, challenging the aesthetic boundaries of architecture contemporary to his writing. In the spirit of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and against architectural theory, Faulkner writes a phenomenological world of his own.