MISSISSIPPI QUARTERLY最新文献

bell hooks's Belonging: A Culture of Place (2009) and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers's The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (2021) exist at the intersection of southernness and Blackness, mapping the ways that the south can be a site of trauma and profound identification for the Black southerners who call it home. Both texts articulate the intense emotional experience that stems from returning to the south and offer alternative models for considering Black southern affects. These models challenge the white emotional paradigm—particularly its preoccupation with nostalgia—that dominates conversations about southern feelings. Situating these two texts within the current discourse surrounding monuments and memorials, this article highlights a non-linear engagement with history that prioritizes the felt aftermaths of slavery and the Jim Crow era in southern Black communities. In centering the complex, and often contradictory, affects that define the Black southern experience, both Belonging and The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois articulate the felt forms through which Black southerners return to both the physical region and history of the south.

This article examines church affiliations and membership of William Faulkner and the extended Falkner family. Faulkner joined the Oxford Methodist Church of Oxford, Mississippi, at age twelve. He attended Sunday school there and his name appeared on Methodist church membership rolls, on different dates, as both "Falkner" and "Faulkner." Although Faulkner and his wife were married in a Presbyterian church, and his wife was Episcopalian, Faulkner was not a regular churchgoer as an adult. His name remained on the Methodist Church membership rolls as late as the 1930s. Most of the living members of Faulkner's family are Episcopalian. Data for this article were collected from the archives of Oxford–University United Methodist Church of Oxford, Mississippi, interviews, and published reports.

Reviewed by:

• William Faulkner and Mortality: A Fine Dead Sound by Ahmed Honeini
• Lorie Watkins Massey

In this first book-length study of William Faulkner and mortality, Ahmed Honeini builds upon and challenges a long critical legacy that has treated Faulkner's writing as a way of denying mortality, of saying "no" to death. Honeini, through careful readings of six key works including The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; "A Rose for Emily"; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; and Go Down, Moses, examines "how Faulkner's characters confront various experiences of human mortality, including grief, bereavement, mourning, and violence." He argues, "The trauma and ambivalence caused by these experiences ultimately compel these characters to 'say Yes to death'" (i).

In distinguishing between Faulkner's personal and his characters' narrative perceptions on the subject of mortality, Honeini grounds his reading firmly in the texts that his study considers. The first three chapters focus on some of Faulkner's most well-known characters. Chapter 1 details how Quentin Compson embraces the idea of suicide in his section of The Sound and the Fury while never uttering the word "suicide" itself. Rather than focusing on a single reason for Quentin's actions, Honeini determines that a number of "contradictory … interconnected" reasons lead to his suicide, including the "exterior voice" of his father (21–22). Quentin, Honeini suggests, transcends language as he "ends his chapter with his decision made and with nothing left to say. The very fact of his death proves that he was able to successfully alter the definition of 'suicide' to suit his own intentions" (42).

Chapter 2 considers Addie Bundren's marginalized, posthumous narrative in As I Lay Dying in which she describes her entire life as a preparation for death. That death simultaneously rejects her identity as a Bundren and constitutes a "revenge" upon her family (52). Chapter 3 turns to another female character as it takes on the story that introduces most readers to Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily." Presented as a conflict between the old and new south, Miss Emily, of course, represents the old antebellum society that is already effectively "dead" by the time of the unnamed narrator's telling of her story. While some critics have suggested that the "rose" of the title represents the story itself, Faulkner's [End Page 272] fictional tribute to that bygone era, Honeini posits a different interpretation: "Given the extent to which the narrator attempt

Three works of fiction by Ernest J. Gaines, each from a different phase of his career, can be classified as significant exercises in using genre norms and styles of emplotment to achieve effects that remain obscured by the very relationship to genre that the novels embody. Of Love and Dust (1967) and A Gathering of Old Men (1983) often appear to simultaneously embrace and hide the elements of genre fiction that determine their narrative moves and plot dynamics. A particular narrative tactic in the third example, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), shows how Gaines deploys what one might call "genre identity" in his fiction as a means to complicate a conventional pattern. The realist mode of the novel, building up a perspective on Louisiana history that encompasses both the subjective and the broader collective frameworks of African American memory, is suspended briefly to give space to a subordinate narrative in a Southern Gothic mode.

Reviewed by:

• Digitizing Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Theresa M. Towner
• Yousef Alhamoudi

No one has defined and demonstrated the potential of digital humanities in navigating literature more than the contributors to Digitizing Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha in the Twenty-First Century. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the Digital Yoknapatawpha Project, commonly referred to as DY, which remains the most technologically sophisticated approach to the works of William Faulkner set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. In the introduction to the volume, Theresa M. Towner, who co-directs DY with Johannes Burgers, another contributor, describes how the project "is encoding the texts set in Faulkner's mythical county into a complex database with sophisticated front-end visualizations in order to see what the nascent field of digital humanities can show us about that world and the people who inhabit it" (1–2). In the first set of essays, contributors provide insights into the development of DY. Paying attention to visualization, Burgers shows how different features, such as events, locations, characters, and demographics, can be visible and traceable through DY. Jennie Joiner looks at locations to demonstrate how "DY is an attempt to illuminate all locations in those texts and make information about them transparent and comprehensive" (35). More precisely, Joiner adds that the project "allows us a bird's-eye view of something that we cannot see unless we change our perspective" (43). Given how place-oriented Faulkner's literature remains, Joiner's discussion provides compelling ways to use DY to aid in situating locations. Discussing characters, Christopher Rieger provides examples of the different ways to look at characters in DY, encouraging users to follow the different examples he provides to make larger conclusions about their employment in Faulkner's fiction. The tips and pointers that Rieger provides most certainly allow users of DY to navigate the sheer volume of diverse and complicated characters Faulkner created in telling ways. As for events, Lorie Watkins defines how "an event in DY consists of a [End Page 269] continuous scene—what happens within a single setting, during an unbroken length of time, with one main focus, and an unchanging narrative style" (69–70). Watkins emphasizes "the ability to click from event to event narratively to get a handle on a text during a first reading" (80). I would add "to get a handle on a text" for the few first readings, as my eight-year experience with DY has pro

This essay rereads Cormac McCarthy's 1979 novel Suttree as a "blues," examining Suttree's deep relationship to the vengeful, hunted black man Ab Jones, whose scarred body and eloquently articulated narrative of persecution leads Suttree to channel his plaintive suffering. Startlingly, the conclusion of the novel, particularly the final image of the huntsman and hounds who the title character fears are chasing him, suggests that McCarthy draws on Delta bluesman Robert Johnson's most famous tune, "Hellhound on My Trail," in his evocation of these hounds and Suttree's fear of them through his channeling the identity of Johnson (behind whom looms Ab Jones). At the same time, the hounds have figuratively embayed a particular Knoxville populace—its black community—with devastating consequences and the hounds' presence through this lyrical intertext at the end of the novel suggest how that community's inhabitants, particularly Ab, continue to be hunted down by the white community's representatives such as the police.

The US Army uniform issued to Caspey Strother, an African American World War I veteran in William Faulkner's Flags in the Dust, is freighted with contested political meaning. This article shows how the novel works to undermine the connection between military attire and citizenship (in the case of Black soldiers) and illuminates an ironic subtextual kinship between Caspey and his creator. In addition, the article places Caspey's uniform within a larger pattern of references in the text to military material culture, a pattern that ultimately points to the incompatibility of the southern warrior ideal with the realities of armed conflict in the twentieth century.

William Faulkner shows the objective and subjective world in intimate dialogue throughout his fiction. His pattern of representing bodies in conversation with buildings through movement and perception is integral to his vision of embodied experience. This article demonstrates how Faulkner employs competing romantic and modernist architectures in service of a descriptive ontology and a new theory of architecture. In "Mirrors of Chartres Street," Faulkner offers a new mode of building that rejects the use of property or tools, heroizing the body itself as a means of building and dwelling.

This essay celebrates John Wilson's visual masterpiece, The Richard Wright Suite (2001), a series of six elegant etchings that reimagine Richard Wright's novella, "Down by the Riverside." Wilson's images, and the story that inspired them, remember lives lost to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Just as Wright's novella has been associated with accounts of the flood lyricized in blues music, Wilson's etchings visualize the blues by depicting the Mississippi River as a striking blue stream. Laboriously crafted in aquatint, the river not only memorializes the power of climate disasters fomented by industrial capitalism, but honors those Black lives claimed in their devastation.