What Is An @Uthor?

"Faulkner in the University is something of a unique artifact," Associate Professor of English Matthew Kirschenbaum writes in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

By Matthew Kirschenbaum, Los Angeles Review of Books

A SPRING DAY in Charlottesville: William Faulkner, dressed in Harris Tweed, leaning casually on a lectern in Cabell Hall to take questions from survey students at the University of Virginia. Or graduate students in American fiction or the undergraduate English Club or even Electrical Engineering majors. Faulkner held three-dozen classroom conferences during his two-year tenure as writer in residence at UVA in 1957 and 1958. His body language and affable expression were captured in a widely reprinted photograph.

Not visible in the photo is an Ampex portable reel-to-reel tape recorder and a studio-grade microphone, as well as the loops of wires and cables accompanying both. These devices — along with his two faculty handlers, Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, who subsequently edited and published transcripts of the recorded sessions as Faulkner in the University(1959) — were the writer’s constant companions at UVA. In other words, barely more than a decade after Beardsley and Wimsatt’s uncompromising disquisition on the “intentional fallacy” (a catchphrase still taught in literature programs today), two English professors availed themselves of the most advanced audio technology they could get their hands on to record every word the author spoke to his audiences.

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