MISSISSIPPI QUARTERLY最新文献

In 2020 Marquita Bradshaw became the first African American woman to win a state-wide race in Tennessee, soaring past her establishment opponents to clinch the Democratic primary for United States Senate. Throughout her campaign, Bradshaw evoked the increasingly popular progressive rallying cry "New South." Bradshaw's vision for a New South is characterized by her call for environmental justice. By speaking about her personal experience with environmental racism, Bradshaw organized a compelling campaign rooted in environmental justice and economic equity based on class solidarity. This article analyzes the powerful yet often overlooked part of Bradshaw's campaign: the religious underpinnings of her environmental justice advocacy. It also examines the historical significance of Bradshaw's use of the term "New South" and how Bradshaw interprets Memphis journalist Ida B. Wells as an inspiration for her movement.

2024 marks the fifty-year anniversary of the publication of John Egerton's The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America (1974), a seminal work on regional and national identity. What did this book get right? What did it get wrong? Fifty years later, it still resonates. From states' rights to gun rights, from immigration to Black voter disfranchisement, from the resurgence of white supremacy to the ongoing significance of race in American life, various issues demonstrate not only how the South has Americanized but also how the nation on the whole has southernized.

• “Southern Living from a Bygone Time”: Gothic Spatialization of History in Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects
• Mattias Pirholt

Unhomeliness in the Old South

Contemporary crime fiction, one could argue, has returned to its roots, that is, the gothic from which the genre evolved in the nineteenth century and with which it has remained intimately entangled ever since (Spooner; Hughes 83–84). If, however, as David Punter has argued, many detective stories lack the subversive qualities that characterize the gothic (167), today’s reformed crime fiction seems to embrace exactly these subversive traits. Thus, it should not come as a surprise that twentieth- and twenty-first-century crime novels adapt and incorporate various gothic conventions (MacArthur). Gillian Flynn’s stunning first novel, Sharp Objects (2006), has been called a psychological thriller, a murder mystery, and domestic noir, but more than anything else, it offers an updated version of the gothic tradition.¹ Against the backdrop of a series of murders in the fictional town of Wind Gap—the murders are being investigated by crime reporter Camille Preaker, a Wind Gap native who left the town long ago to live in Chicago—the novel draws on typically gothic motifs such as “the female (abject) body, the returning (and recurring) of repressed pasts, motherhood, and the monstrous-feminine” (Gardner 53). More specifically, [End Page 381] and with a distinctively contemporary atmosphere, the story depicts mental illness in the shape of Munchausen syndrome by proxy (today known as factitious disorder imposed on another), PTSD, and female self-mutilation as well as the abuse of opioids and other prescription drugs, in addition to and in combination with alcohol, meth, and marijuana.

Set in the southeastern parts of Missouri, close to the Missouri/Tennessee border, Sharp Objects might even be said to belong to, or at least geographically approach, the Southern Gothic tradition. This prolific tradition can be traced back to key writers of the American south such as William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor. Their novels and stories revel in the social claustrophobia of the small southern town; substance abuse; inexplicable and excessive use of violence; hereditary sins; generational, class, and gender conflicts; poverty; diseases; death; and feelings of existential despair— all of which are overshadowed by slavery and racism in their past and present manifestations. Although a sense of place is crucial to the gothic of the American south, the genre’s trademarks are less bound to a specific geography and more to what this geography implies. According to David

• “They got . . .”: Ernest J. Gaines’s Semiotic Reversal of William Faulkner
• Matthew Teutsch

David Lionel Smith argues that rather than creating a hierar-chical reading of authors like William Faulkner and Ernest J. Gaines, which would ultimately place Gaines in a subordinate position since he follows Faulkner chronologically, “we need an egalitarian hermeneutic, which would insist upon locating both authors as respondents to and participants in an on-going cultural discourse” (59). Both Gaines and Faulkner participate in the “on-going cultural discourse” of race in the United States, and specifically in the South. Drawing upon Smith’s assertion, this article examines the ways that each author uses a specific, third-person pronoun to explore the semiotic connotations between that word and issues of race and segregation.

Throughout his career, Gaines commented on the influence that Faulkner had on his writing. In 1969, Gaines told Gregory Fitzgerald and Peter Marchant that for “A Long Day in November,” he got the style “from Faulkner and from Joyce” (13). Speaking with Fred Beauford in 1972, Gaines commented on the way that Faulkner made him listen to people talk: “[T]his man taught me how to listen to dialogue; he taught me how to leave out. You can say one word and if you say it right and build up to it and follow through, it can carry as much meaning as if you had used an entire sentence.” While Faulkner taught Gaines structure, style, and dialogue, the Louisiana author had “no interest in Faulkner’s philosophy,” and this is where Gaines’s response to and reworking of the Mississippian come into play (19).

Through his use of the third-person plural pronoun “they,” Gaines directly confronts “Faulkner’s philosophy,” using the semiotic connections of the word to point out the ways that language works to render individuals invisible and construct meaning. In “Discourse in the Novel,” Mikhail Bakhtin points out that literature calls for “dialogic penetration into the word,” which “opens up fresh aspects in the word [End Page 437] . . . which, since they were revealed by dialogic means, become more immediate to perception” (352). Thinking about specific words and the connotations they inherently bring to mind, we can explore the ways that Gaines deploys the word “they” throughout some of his works and consider these instances in relation to Faulkner’s description of Dilsey and her family in the appendix to The Sound and the Fury (1929), which first appeared in Malcolm Cowley’s 1946 The Portable Faulkner.

After extensively chronicling the history of the Compson family from 1699–1945 and relating what happened to the Compson characters after the end of the novel, Faulkner’s ap

• Watson’s Faulkner: A Most Splendid Contribution
• Ahmed Honeini

Jay Watson, Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies at the University of Mississippi, is widely considered one of the leading authorities on Faulkner working today. His latest offerings, William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity (2019) and its companion volume Fossil Fuel Faulkner: Energy, Modernity, and the US South (2022) are insightful, well-argued, and welcome contributions to the field. Throughout both books, Watson displays a confident command of his topic, evincing an intimate, acute knowledge of Faulkner’s centrality within the modernist canon and, indeed, the key scholarly debates surrounding modernism more broadly. Watson’s “hope” for both books is that “by returning to the utterly uncontroversial fact of Faulkner’s modernism with a critical sensibility sharpened by new modernism studies,” his scholarship “will spark further reappraisal of [Faulkner’s] distinguished and quite dazzling” oeuvre (Faces of Modernity 37). Watson deftly achieves his aim with systematic rigor across both volumes, engaging his readers with fluency, cogency, and lyricism.

In William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity, Watson divides his scholarly attention across five distinct yet interconnected concepts: rural modernization, technology and media, racial modernities, and biopolitical modernity. The book opens with an examination of modernity’s impact on rural Mississippi in As I Lay Dying and three short stories: “Mules in the Yard,” “Shingles for the Lord,” and “Barn Burning.” In these works, the rural South of the early twentieth century may outwardly appear to be diametrically opposed to—and, indeed, fundamentally incapable of embracing—modernity. Watson argues, however, that these texts in fact demonstrate that families like the Bundrens and the Snopeses take an active role in modernization:

for a select group of Faulkner’s rural subjects, modernization isn’t something that the novelist, from his privileged regional vantage point, can see happening to them, [End Page 453] radiating outward from town and more distant centers of capitalist development, so much as something he watches them do, something they bring with them into the hamlets, towns, and cities they subsequently shock, energize, and estrange.

(44)

As such, the opening chapter of Faces of Modernity offer a riposte to any reader or scholar of Faulkner and southern fiction tempted to assert that passivity or resistance to the processes of modernization is a key theme which dominates these works, As I Lay Dying in particular. Such

• Pheoby’s Queer Quietness in Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Benjamin Bagocius

Pheoby Watson in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is a figure who speaks up for, listens to, and invites queer discourse, or narrations of the sexual that nuance givens about desire by unsettling normative cisheterosexual storylines. In doing so, Pheoby models leadership in creating queer possibility, or ways to enjoy, express, and reimagine desires that dwell outside sexual standardization.¹ When Pheoby’s close friend Janie Crawford returns to the town of Eatonville after a prolonged absence, most townspeople watching her arrival presume to know what sexuality is, especially women’s sexuality. Unlike Pheoby, the townspeople tend to be heteronormative apologists. They want Janie’s erotic experience to conclude in a predictable way, and then they judge her for her supposed failures at normative heterosexuality: “[W]e all know how she went ’way from here and us sho seen her come back,” one townsperson asserts (Their Eyes 3). They would rather presume and judge than listen “to be surprised” (Tippett 29).² “’Tain’t no use in your tryin’ to cloak no ole woman lak Janie Starks” (Their Eyes 3) assert the townspeople, who “sat in judgment” [End Page 405] (1) holding foregone conclusions “’bout dese ole women,” apparently like Janie, “runnin’ after young boys” (3). Hurston associates their pronouncements about a woman’s sexuality with “mass cruelty” (2). In contrast, Pheoby approaches matters of sexuality as realms of the inconclusive. The first time Pheoby speaks, she introduces discursive space for sexual indeterminacy and queer story(telling): “Well, nobody don’t know if it’s anything to tell or not. Me, Ah’m her best friend, and Ah don’t know” (3).

Pheoby inserts the language of not knowing (“nobody don’t know” and “Ah don’t know”), conditionality and alternative (“if”), and not disclosing (“tell or not”) in conversations that presume sexual determinability and disclosure. Pheoby thus serves as a queer agent because she neither makes assumptions about women’s sexuality nor expects women’s confession about it, what Phoeby calls the porch sitters’ notions that Janie should “speak tuh suit ’em” (5). Pheoby’s outlook aligns with a foundation of queer thought: to invite non-knowability rather than seek consensus about what sexuality looks, sounds, or behaves like. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick posits in Epistemology of the Closet (1990), a foundational text for queer literary studies, queer thought unsettles givens about sexuality and finds in the se