Narrative and the “Gift of Vision”: The Photography of Jack Spencer McDonald, Robert L Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which […]
Category: Southern Quarterly
Scribe of River Lake Plantation: A Conversation with Ernest J. Gaines, The Brown, Anne Gray He’s your favorite uncle. You know, the one who takes you by the hand and lets you buy anything you want at the candy counter despite the “rules about sweets.” He’s the one who introduces you to his personal motley […]
“Ineffable Sociabilities”: Criss-Crossing, Game-Playing, and Sight-Seeing with Walker Percy in His Delta Rudnicki, Robert W You SEE THEM EVERYWHERE you drive. Bumperstickers. Rear window decals. Personalized license plates. They solicit our attention the second we get behind the wheel. To put it delicately, inane signs and messages adorn a surprising number of automobiles in the […]
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Walking on Water
Walking on Water Ruffin, Paul A SON OF THE DEEP SOUTH, I never knew the kind of long, intensive cold we saw in movies back then, where people skirred about on the mirrorlike surface of ponds, wearing strange-looking skates with runners instead of wheels; where dogsleds crossed vast, lonely, warmth-stealing continents of white, driven by […]
Mark Twain’s “spelling match” speech Smith, Harriet Elinor ON THE EVENING OF 12 MAY 1875, Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) participated in a spelling match-part of a fund-raising fair-at the Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford, Connecticut. Presiding over the event was Clemens’s good friend Joseph H. Twichell, pastor of the church. Although Clemens had […]
Riffing on memory and playing through the break: Blues in Lewis Nordan’s music of the swamp and wolf whistle Baker, Barbara A WHILE THE INFLUENCE OF BLUES MUSIC on the fiction and poetry of writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Langsten Hughes, and Sterling Brown is widely recognized, the aesthetic strategies associated with blues music continue […]
“Violence, The Body and the “The South” Miles, Caroline “Violence, The Body, and `The South.”‘ Edited by Houston Baker and Dana Nelson. American Literature 73.2 (2001). Over the last decade, a number of prominent scholars have worked to reassess scholarly representations of the South. This special edition of American Literature is the result of Houston […]
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An interview with Lewis Nordan
An interview with Lewis Nordan Dupuy, Edward J I HAD THE OPPORTUNITY to meet Lewis (Buddy) Nordan when he graciously accepted my invitation to read at the annual Walker Percy Symposium in 1999. I ferried him from New Orleans across the twenty-four mile span of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway and knew from the ease of […]
“To shadow forth its presence”: Simms’s Gothic narrative poems Fisher, Benjamin F Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again. -Ralph Waldo Emerson I MY TITLE, OF COURSE, draws upon Simms’s early poem, “The Fearful Memory,” itself inspired by its creator’s reading of German romance, its themes dovetailing with others in […]
Visualizing the Blues: A multimedia review Snyder, Robert E Exhibit: “Visualizing the Blues, Images of the American South, 1862-1999.” Catalog: Wendy McDaris, ed. Foreword by John Grisham. Visualizing the Blues: Images of the American South. Memphis: Dixon Gallery and Gardens, 2000. Hardcover: ISBN 0– 945064-04-7 CD: Eddie Dattel, prod.”Goin’ Down South: Blues Sampler.” Memphis: Inside […]