The Mississippi Quarterly articles from September 1995

The Mississippi Quarterly archives from September 1995

Tennessee sightings.(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... It seems I've been following Tennessee all my life. I saw him for the first time when I was seventeen years old. It was the spring of '52 and my fellow members of the graduating class of Yazoo City, Mississippi, high school and I were staying in...

Memories of Tennessee Williams. (5/3/95)(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... He gave passion and dreams a voice, a terribly hard thing to do. But I would not have said that when the Williams influence snuck upon me in my late teens. Then, he was a mode of high-styled declamation that liberated me from smothered everything...

'Suddenly last summer,' Cathy, Lion's View State Hospital.' (poem)(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... We're lions tamed with medication. Our roars surround us. There are seven kinds of lion, treatments for each. I'm an exotic: half lion, half woman. The halves are invisible. How can the surgeon know which to remove? A thin knife enters the brain...

Denizens: vieux carre. (poem)(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... Tripping from bar to banquette to bar, killing the seconds of a sweaty afternoon when the river breeze will not genuflect at the cathedral, when the memories of old Count No-Count shimmer in the aroma of Dixie-45, Regal, Jax, and Tennessee's...

Cat on a cold wood roof: for Tennessee Williams. (poem)(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... Two cats huddle on a goal post fence, Discussing normalcy. But, Crap! Nothing can outrun time -- Not love, nor liquor, Nor the other cat dancing past On the cold wood roof of his prime In the winter of coffin pine. "Long, long, high, high...

An interview with Eudora Welty on Tennessee Williams.(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)(Interview)
September 22, 1995... It is very difficult to think about Tennessee Williams and his plays while sitting in Eudora Welty's living room. On this particular day, also, the sirens of a tornado warning were sounding, which added to the drama of which Tennessee Williams...

An interview with Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander on Tennessee Williams.(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)(Interview)
September 22, 1995... I have known Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander for many years, both as a colleague at Jackson State University and as a friend. While serving as a professor at JSU, Dr. Alexander was known by her students as an excellent teacher. Add to this her...

James Whitehead on Tennessee Williams: an interview.(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)(Interview)
September 22, 1995... I have known Jim Whitehead for many years and have never heard him speak more enthusiastically about a literary artist than he does of Tennessee Williams. Conducting this interview was a great pleasure because of the tremendous admiration I could...

"He died in winter."(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... On February 23, 1983, America lost its greatest playwright. This was the assessment of Walter Kerr, drama critic for the New York Times and not often disputed. Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams, was seventy-one years old. Although...

Tennessee Williams's "Vengeance of Nitocris": the keynote to future works.(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... Throughout his literary career, when asked about love, Tennessee Williams almost always answered with an explanation about his relationship with his sister, Rose. He called their love "the deepest of their lives," a love that precluded the need...

Tennessee Williams's St. Louis blues.(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... He called it "that dreaded city," the City of St. Pollution. When asked what brought him to New Orleans, he would answer "St. Louis!" New Orleans is so glamorous that biographers and critics tend to pass over St. Louis, and Williams fostered...

Tennessee Williams: a Southern writer.(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... Although many consider Tennessee Williams to be this century's foremost American playwright, surprisingly little has been said about his debt to Southern literary conventions or his regional bias. His criticisms of the South, overt and implied,...

Culture, power, and the (en)gendering of community: Tennessee Williams and politics.(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... "I think it is only in the case of Brecht that a man's politics, if the man is an artist, are of particular importance in his work; his degrees of talent and of humanity are what count."--Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (1975) I...

Rule by power: "Big Daddyism" in the world of Tennessee Williams's plays.(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... "Doublethink," "Newspeak," and "Thought Control"; "Big Brother Is Watching You" and "Big Brother Will Never Die"; "Who Controls the Past Controls the Future" and "Who Controls the Present Controls the Past"; "War Is Peace," ...

The stork and the reaper, the madonna and the stud: procreation and mothering in Tennessee Williams's plays.(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... In April 1995, an unforgettable image of the Depression years was on display in the "Dorothea Lange: American Photographs" exhibit at New York's International Center of Photography. Lange's famous close-up of an anxious woman in a ragged sweater...

Come back to the locker room ag'in, Brick honey!(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... The ideal of male companionship is one of the most enduring myths in American literature. As Leslie Fiedler argues in "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!," the works that we most revere tend to be boys' books. These narratives "proffer a...

The Japanese premiere of 'A Streetcar Named Desire.'(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... The first Asian production of A Tennessee Williams play occurred in Japan, where A Streetcar Named Desire was performed fifty-four times from March 19 to May 30, 1953, by the Bungakuza Dramatic Company. Bungakuza, or "national theatre" in...

Ambiguity and performance in the plays of Tennessee Williams.(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... Ambiguity has been a recurring theme in discussions of plays by Tennessee Williams. Traditional criticism has emphasized this focus even beyond the level expected of the New Criticism or formalism. At times the concern for ambiguous structures...

Gaze and resistance in the plays of Tennessee Williams.(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... The problem is to seize the glimpse. --Robert Motherwell(1) When we see Stanley Kowalski on the stage, we aren't seeing Stanley at all. Nor are we seeing an actor playing Stanley, since Stanley never existed. Actors do not play people-they play...

Tennessee Williams, film, music, Alex North: an interview with Luigi Zaninelli.(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)(Interview)
September 22, 1995... Tennessee Williams's keen appreciation of the power of music to create atmosphere and define character is evident throughout his canon. In Battle of Angels (later Orpheus Descending), Williams's fugitive-kind hero is Val Xavier, a musician whose...

An interview with Dakin Williams.(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)(Interview)
September 22, 1995... Dakin Williams, born eight years after Tennessee, has come to regard himself as a "professional brother." Having retired in large part from his law practice, Mr. Williams now spends a considerable portion of his time helping perpetuate the memory...

Tennessee Williams's graphic art: "Two on a party."(Special Issue: Tennessee Williams)
September 22, 1995... In 1928, Tom Williams published his first short story, "The Vengeance of Nitocris," a lurid account of how an Egyptian queen avenges the death of her brother. Williams was seventeen years old. As he revised an early draft of the story for Weird...