The Mississippi Quarterly articles from December 2004

The Mississippi Quarterly archives from December 2004

William Faulkner reprised: isolation in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2004... A CRITICAL DISCUSSION OF ALMOST ANY AUTHOR IN CONJUNCTION WITH modernist giant William Faulkner risks treating Faulkner's work as a master text. This potential for privilege perhaps accounts for Toni Morrison's sensitivity to such comparisons...

McCarthy, Mac Airt and mythology: Suttree and the Irish high king.(Cormac McCarthy, Cormac Mac Airt, Buddy Suttree)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2004... IN THE RICHLY ALLUSIVE NOVEL SUTTREE, CORMAC MCCARTHY BORROWS structural devices from Irish tales of the high kings to give shape and meaning to Buddy Suttree's wanderings. Some of the allusions in Suttree extend back through The Waste Land to...

A Dying Gaul: the signifying phallus and Tennessee Williams's "Three Players of a Summer Game".
December 22, 2004... I liked your trenchant letter to the Times about the Goetz play. David Stewart wrote me about it, saying it was "dull, unimaginative," so I'm not surprised at your reaction. But I'd like to see it for the performances, and I do hope I'll get...

Breadcrumb trails and spider webs: form in Yonder Stands Your Orphan.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2004... You must leave now, take what you need, you think you will last. But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast. Yonder stands your orphan with his gun, Crying like a fire in the sun. "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"--Bob Dylan ...

The enigma at the keyboard: Chopin's Mademoiselle Reisz.(Kate Chopin)(Critical essay)(Character overview)
December 22, 2004... OF THE INTELLECTUAL WOMEN DEPICTED IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY American literature, one of the most enigmatic is Kate Chopin's Mademoiselle Reisz, the virtuosic pianist in The A wakening. Alternately seen as an "artistic role model," a "pseudo-mother...

Exorcizing blue devils: The Night of the Iguana as Tennessee Williams's ultimate confessional.
December 22, 2004... TENNESSEE WILLIAMS ADMITTED MORE THAN ONCE THAT HE HAD WRITTEN all of his plays for his beloved sister, Rose. Their unusually close relationship, borne of their childhood isolation and unfortunate family life, was changed permanently when their...

Reconstructing rebellion: the politics of narrative in the Confederate memoir.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2004... RECENT SCHOLARSHIP ON VETERANS' REMEMBRANCES OF THE CIVIL WAR HAS focused on how, after Reconstruction, the veterans ignored race and slavery in favor of a sentimental emphasis on the brotherhood of soldiers. James M. McPherson, writing about...

A visit with Walker Percy: an interview and a recollection (1).(Interview)
December 22, 2004... FROM THE MOMENT I COMPLETED READING WALKER PERCY'S 1961 NOVEL THE Moviegoer, winner of the National Book Award the following year, I could see why some readers might wonder whether Percy's fiction provided the missing link between post-World...

Comment on Michael O'Brien's Conjectures of Order.(Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860. 2 vols.)(Book review)
December 22, 2004... Southern Roundtable on Michael O'Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860. 2 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. The following papers, including Michael O'Brien's response,...

Irony and Southern authorship.
December 22, 2004... MICHAEL O'BRIEN'S CONJECTURES OF ORDER IS A LEARNED, POWERFULLY argued, remarkably well-proportioned study of intellectual life and culture in the U.S. South before the Civil War. It has been called "magisterial," "humane," and "a triumph." It...

Think about the South: Michael O'Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2004... IN AN ESSAY THAT FIRST APPEARED MORE THAN TWO DECADES AGO, Michael O'Brien inserted a prophecy that he may not remember now, but that accurately describes the immensity of the task he has undertaken in Conjectures of Order. "We should err if we...

Masters, slaves, and the "Mind of the South".(Critical essay)
December 22, 2004... WHENEVER THE PHRASE "THE MIND OF THE SOUTH" CROPS UP, POOR feckless Roony Lee nearly always seems to get trotted out as a prime example of white Southern mindlessness--although he was anything but poor and feckless to the half-envious Henry...

Response to my critics.
December 22, 2004... I NEED TO START BY THANKING MY FOUR CRITICS FOR THEIR ACUMEN AND, especially, their generosity. Conjectures of Order was written over many years, under isolated conditions, and the task of writing was so absorbing that I gave little thought to...

Seven questions about Southern poetry.
December 22, 2004... I DON'T MUCH LIKE QUESTIONNAIRES, AND I DON'T MUCH LIKE pronouncements about Southern poetry. Yet here I am, the author (with Robert West's help) of a questionnaire about Southern poetry. Why the change of heart? Curiosity, first of all: I...

Kelly Cherry in her poetry: the subject as object.
December 22, 2004... EARLY ON, KELLY CHERRY WAS A STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY AT THE University of Virginia. In a charming uncollected poem she enclosed in a letter to me, "To Ian Hacking," she portrays herself as a young woman intoxicated with learning and enchanted by...

Worlds of eye and ear in the poems of William Harmon.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2004... The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. (Bottom, Midsummer Night's Dream, IV.i) IN PLATO'S PHAEDRUS, SOCRATES'S...

"Unto all generations of the faithful heart": Donald Davidson, the Vanderbilt Agrarians, and Appalachian poetry.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2004... BY THE EARLY 1930S THE VANDERBILT FUGITIVES, THOUGH NO LONGER A viable group, had acquired an international reputation along with considerable influence in the world of letters, and some of them, along with new allies, were moving on to engage...

New fugitives: contemporary poets of countermemory and the futures of Southern poetry.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2004... Those people, black and white, who care about their particular South should take heart from a vision in which regional identity is continuously being replenished even as other forms, older forms, erode and mutate. Anything that has happened and...

Anybody raised down home--down south: Brother to Dragons and Warren's southern ethnography.(Robert Penn Warren)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2004... SINCE THE REVISED VERSION OF ROBERT PENN WARREN'S 1953 BOOK-LENGTH poem Brother to Dragons appeared in 1979, (1) numerous scholarly responses have concentrated on the political implications of the poem's central event, the 1811 murder of a...

"Trying to make contact": "Mortmain" as pre-text for Robert Penn Warren's Portrait of a Father.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2004... JOSEPH BLOTNER'S ROBERT PENN WARREN: A BIOGRAPHY (2002) TAKES AS its starting point the early years of Warren's father, Robert Franklin Warren. The elder Warren was born in southwestern Kentucky on February 14, 1869, son to a Confederate...

Horton Foote and the American theater.(Orphans' Home: The Voice and Vision of Horton Foote)(Horton Foote: A Literary Biography)(Horton Foote and the Theater of Intimacy)(Book review)
December 22, 2004... Orphans' Home: the Voice and Vision of Horton Foote, by Laurin Porter. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. x, 233 pp. $49.95 cloth. $22.95 paper.; Horton Foote: A Literary Biography, by Charles S. Watson. Austin: University of...

Four slave narratives from the old north state.(North Carolina Slave Narratives: The Lives of Moses Roper, Lunsford Lane, Moses Grandy, and Thomas H. Jones)(Book review)
December 22, 2004... North Carolina Slave Narratives: The Lives of Moses Roper, Lunsford Lane, Moses Grandy, and Thomas H. Jones, by William L. Andrews, general editor. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 279 pp. $27.50 IN HIS GENERAL...

Othered southernism: anthologizing experimentalism in contemporary southern poetry.(Another South: Experimental Writing in the South)(Book review)
December 22, 2004... Another South: Experimental Writing in the South, by Bill Lavender, ed. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002. 304 pp. $28.95 paper. ANY ANTHOLOGY TITLED ANOTHER SOUTH: EXPERIMENTAL WRITING IN the South is problematized from the outset by the...

Walker Percy's Search for Community.(Book review)
December 22, 2004... Walker Percy's Search for Community, by John F. Desmond. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. 271 pp. $39.95 cloth. JOHN R. DESMOND'S NEW BOOK, WALKER PERCY'S SEARCH FOR COMMUNITY, is the most distinctive contribution to Percy...

Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South.(Book review)
December 22, 2004... Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South, by Robert B. Outland III. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. 352 pp. $47.95. EARLY TRAVELERS IN THE SOUTH NEVER FAILED TO REMARK UPON THE curious and...

Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South.(Book review)
December 22, 2004... Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, by Ralph C. Wood. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004. xii, 272 pp. $22.00 hard, $15.00 paper. AFTER FOUR DECADES OF ATTENTION TO FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S WORK, what remains to be said about her...