It’s a haunted season, but is it even eerier below the Mason-Dixon Line?
Eric Gary Anderson, faculty member in the Department of English, has teamed up with Georgia State University English professor Gina Caison for an episode of her weekly podcast, About South. Anderson and Caison collaborate on “The Faulkner Witch Project,” which opens with their efforts to record the episode in very close proximity to William Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi, grave.
The podcast touches on the South as a natural setting for supernatural tales of agitated spirits, and discusses how the historical, factual horrors of slavery, Indian removal, and colonization form a backdrop on which fictional monsters such as vampires, zombies, and ghosts can rise up. These sorts of creatures populate Anderson’s most recent book, Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture (LSU Press, 2015, co-edited with Taylor Haygood and Daniel Cross Turner).
Complete with the suspenseful revelation of the actual recording from Faulkner’s final resting place, the informative podcast might just suggest a late October visit to a southern climate.
October 28, 2016