The Mississippi Quarterly articles from September 2003

The Mississippi Quarterly archives from September 2003

Southern Orientalism: Flannery O'Connor's cosmopolis.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2003... And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium. --W. B. Yeats IN THIS ESSAY I WANT TO EXPLORE the weird connections among tattoo culture, Cold War imperialism, and Flannery O'Connor's funky love of the...

Rethinking community: post-plantation literatures in postmodernity.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2003... THIS SYMPOSIUM RAISES THE QUESTION of what it means to identify literatures with local spaces, a difficult issue in a historical period characterized by convulsive globalization, which disperses cultural and economic forms and practices. In...

On reading south in the new world: Whitman, Marti, Glissant, and the Hegelian dialectic.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2003... IT MIGHT NOT CONCERN US TO REALIZE that Hegel would not be pleased to know about efforts to explore literary commonalities in the Americas. This is because he believed the future belonged to the West, as the course of empire would go; the telos...

Walter Scott, postcolonial theory, and New South literature.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2003... THE IMPORTANCE OF SIRWALTER SCOTT'S FICTION for U.S. Southern culture has hardly gone unnoticed, from Mark Twain's exasperated quip about the South's "Sir Walter disease" (1) or Charles W. Chesnutt's ironic allusions to Ivanhoe in The House...

Southern turns.
September 22, 2003... IT SEEMS APPROPRIATE THAT THE FIRST BASIC QUESTION we raise about the South be fundamentally philosophical, so that we ask pointedly where it is. It is admittedly refreshing that we can't answer with exactness nowadays. Indeed, to invoke the...

Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and the postcolonial gaze.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2003... IT'S ALWAYS INTERESTING TO SEE HOW the besieged organizers of literary conferences sort out file piles of proposals they're given into more or less coherent panels. I was particularly challenged to see this paper assigned to a panel called...

Painting the South with a Northern eye.
September 22, 2003... THE SOUTH WAS A CRITICAL SITE OF "immersion" for African-American writers in the 1920s and 1930s. In Robert B. Stepto's mapping of North and South journeys in African-American novels and narratives, literary protagonist return to an Arcadian,...

Inventing the tropical South: race, region, and the colonial model.
September 22, 2003... IN 1915, ELLSWORTH HUNTINGTON, a geographer at Yale University, published a book entitled Civilization and Climate that illustrated how tropical and sub-tropical climates inhibited the development of modern civilization around the globe....

"Disturbing the calculation": the narcissistic arithmetic of three southern writers.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2003... "Oh I know. I know. You give mc two and two and you tell me it makes five and it does make five." --William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! "Never mind about algebra here. That's for poor folks. There's no need for algebra where two and...

West meets east: nineteenth-century southern dialogues on mixture, race, gender, and nation.
September 22, 2003... WHEN I WAS GROWING UP IN THE EASTERN HALF of the United States, American history was presented to me in neatly binary terms: Cowboys and Indians, North and South, Black and White. There were binaries when my family moved out West, too, but the...

Phantom Limbs (1).
September 22, 2003... long dark deck and the water surround me long dark deck and the silence is over me limbo limbo like me stick is the whip and the dark deck is slavery --Edward Kamau Brathwaite, "Caliban" (2) limbo: Prison, confinement,...

Richard Ford.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Richard Ford, by Elinor Ann Walker. New York: Twayne, 2000. xiii, 226 pp. $33.00 cloth. IN THIS MONOGRAPH, ELINOR ANN WALKER develops two themes that are particularly useful perspectives on Richard Ford: his fiction's fraught relation to...

A Century of Early Ecocriticism.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... A Century of Early Ecocriticism, edited by David Mazel. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. 370 pp. $50 cloth. $25 paper. THE SCHOLARLY STUDY OF ENVIRONMENTAL themes and issues in literature has become an important new edge in the...

Obscurity's Myriad Components: the Theory and Practice of William Faulkner.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Obscurity's Myriad Components: The Theory and Practice of William Faulkner, by R. Rio-Jelliffe. Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 2001. 201 pp. $36.00. DECONSTRUCTIONIST APPROACHES TO FAULKNER have traditionally had...

Tennessee Williams and the South.(Book Review)
September 22, 2003... Tennessee Williams and the South, by Kenneth Holditch and Richard Freeman Leavitt. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. vii, 184 pp. $30.00; Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams, edited by Ralph F. Voss. Tuscaloosa:...