ABSTRACT: This essay examines characters’ detachment from reality in Michael Farris Smith’s Blackwood as a revision of the Southern Gothic grotesque, revealing what Object-oriented ontology refers to as correlationism: the assumed supremacy of the perceiving subject and corresponding blindness to the ontological reality of objects. Such detachment manifests in the novel not only through the accumulation of ghost stories and other superstitions in the local idiom, but also in the systematic failure of communication: circular monologues and dialogues, endless trivial questions, elusive answers, and characters’ repeated demands for linguistic, discursive exchange with the novel’s hyperpresent, post-instrumental objects. These hyperpresent objects resonate with recurring Southern Gothic forms and “insist” upon themselves in a non-linguistic idiom through their presence and energy, resisting deconstructive approaches that would reduce them to signifiers; meanwhile, the novel’s characters remain unable to apprehend this thing-speech because of their entrenched correlationism. Blackwood therefore incorporates familiar Southern Gothic forms to reflect facets of correlationism, explores the limitations and failures of this perspective, and meditates on the potentials of thing-speech to foster new, ontologically inclusive dispositions toward reality.

ABSTRACT: This article contains transcriptions of five different endings that Dorothy Allison considered for her 1992 novel Bastard Out of Carolina . Drawing on her manuscripts held at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University, I consider the ways that the novel would have changed with each ending: from one where Mama stays, to one that includes Bone in prison. These alternate endings provide important insights into Allison’s process for readers and scholars of her work.

ABSTRACT: While it has often been held that the blues is no longer a significant part of African American life, this article argues that the genre is very much alive for Black listeners in Deep South locales such as the Mississippi Delta and the Alabama Black Belt. From the early 1970s to the present, African American fans in these areas have continued to listen to blues performed by singers unfamiliar to most contemporary white blues listeners, including Z. Z. Hill, Denise LaSalle, Miss Jody, and O. B. Buchana. While the blues style these artists perform has sometimes been labeled soul-blues or Southern Soul, for the fans who have kept it alive over the years, it is usually considered “just straight blues.” This article contends that this postmodern blues form shows strong thematic continuity with the blues tradition while maintaining a stylistic flexibility that aligns it with late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century blues forms documented in recent scholarship.

ABSTRACT: Independent filmmakers Jaqueline Olive and Sharon Linezo Hong both have a relationship with the Gulf Coast that ties their work together, specifically the long effects of Hurricane Katrina. While Olive’s and Hong’s films cover different subjects—the COVID-19 pandemic and the BP Oil Spill, respectively—their shared desire to tell the stories of oft-neglected communities helps round out the historical understanding of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. Though Olive’s and Hong’s canonical films are about some of the greatest tragedies of the twenty-first century, their works are equally about survival and ancestral tradition told from unique Black and Indigenous perspectives.

ABSTRACT: Henry Clay Lewis's "Valerian and the Panther" (1850) offers a rich source for thinking about the haunting discourses of animals, extinction, and human geographies in the Anthropocene channeled through the focus on North America's infamous panther. The panther has become immortalized within the culture of the US South through both its significant role within the history of North America as well as its subsequent mythological construction as the American "ghost cat." Lewis's shadowy panther traverses the boundaries between life and death, between past and present, to haunt the swamp as the shadowy "ghost cat"—an effectively extinct animal whose continued place within the literary landscape is maintained by its spectral mythologization. Ultimately, this article argues that Lewis's panther materializes as a ghostly omen of the ecological destruction wrought by settler colonialism and a testament to the consequences of this destruction felt in our present moment through the large-scale extinction and notable absence of key species.

ABSTRACT: 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: Digitizing Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Theresa M. Towner Yousef Alhamoudi Digitizing Faulkner: Yoknapatawpha in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Theresa M. Towner. University of Virginia Press, 2022. 230 pp. $95 cloth, $35 paper, $22.50 eBook. 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 proven. In another set of essays, contributors have applied various DY tools in their readings of specific texts as case studies. Using DY to trace trauma in Sanctuary, Ben Robbins accurately "suggest[s] that digital humanities (DH) projects such as DY, which embed speculative and interpretative functions within them, can chart the movements of modernist narratives in revealing new ways" (85). In a crucial essay about a larger debate, Erin Penner reads "Appendix Compson 1699–1945" to describe DY's treatment of the issue of consistency in Faulkner's fiction: The digital project offers a third way: not Cowley's insistence that discrepancies be resolved, nor Faulkner's refusal to return to earlier work to integrate the worlds he has created. Instead, the data of DY is grounded in particular texts, but it also facilitates comparisons across Faulkner's body of work. (106) Focusing on The Hamlet, John Michael Corrigan "provides the reader with an interpretative architecture for using systems theory and the concept of complexity to understand Faulkner's representation of the social body" (125). More specifically, Corrigan concludes that DY provides a variety of additional features from the location-character graphs that we originally analyzed to heatmaps and to a forthcoming demographic toolkit that lets users slice through the data to quantify the racial and gender makeup of a particular novel or the entirety of the Yoknapatawpha fiction. (147) This essay could have benefited from an elaboration of DY's features when applying the different models and theories discussed. The remaining essays look at various ways DY can be applied...

ABSTRACT: 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.