Contenu du sommaire : European Issue 2 : stemming the Mississippi

The reality of the River, though fluctuating and difficult to grasp in Huckleberry Finn, relies on a network of precise and specialized terms. Through a corpus of three key versions produced between 1886 and 1960, the problems posed to translators by this particular aspect of the novel can be assessed. It appears that dialects have retained more attention than technolects, which nevertheless play an active part in the polyphony of the novel, offer an occasion to make up for the loss of dialects and can even shed new light on the original.

The city of Cahokia—near St. Louis—is the hearth of the complex Indian culture of the Mississippi valley, with its different components. That is where Zebulon Pike started his journey in search of the sources of the Mississippi in 1805. Pike was neither a scientist nor a surveyor: he was a mere lieutenant. Jefferson had instructed him to show to American natives the symbol of a new hegemonic power: the flag of the United States. A close examination of his Account of a Voyage Up The Mississippi River from St. Louis to Its Source reveals an Indian universe with the various local tribes in a permanent state of war, for whom Americans are “a warlike people.” The newcomers were to force Indians onto reservations, turning the Mississippi (“Father of the Waters”) into a polluted area where a tradition of respect for “Mother Earth” is now lost and meaningless.

This paper examines the accounts of three British women, Margaret Hall, Frances Trollope, and Harriet Martineau, who travelled on the Mississippi River around the year 1830. In their separate narratives and contrasting experiences of the river at this crucial moment in its history, they provided defining and archetypical answers to the problems that the Mississippi posed for its travellers in the decades before the Civil War. How were travellers to experience the giant river that confounded aesthetic principles? And how was the nation to embrace the symbolic central artery that bisected their young country?

Andrew Jackson's son bought a plantation along the Mississippi River in 1838. But bad weather starting the following winter crippled the potential profitability of the farm as the correspondence of Andrew Jackon, Sr., testifies. Overseers could be blamed, but they did not cause the constant floodings which washed away valuable cut wood and animals, damaged or ruined crops. Andrew Jackson, Sr., saw his hopes of prosperity crushed by mounting debts and the property was sold by his son after his death, in 1849. The sense of hopelessness and despair caused by the Mississippi floodings in those years anticipated later scenes of rural life along the River, as in 1927 for example.

In the course of Life on the Mississippi, the evocation of the storied river drifts to the exploration of the undercurrents of the mind. By plunging the writer into the flow of memories, the free play of mental associations stirs up troubled waters and sets them ablaze.

Was Congo Square—now Armstrong Park—in New Orleans, the birth place of jazz music? Very little reliable historical information is available about the place but what we know for certain is that three men, one musician and two journalists, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, George Washington Cable, and Lafcadio Hearn, did construct Congo Square as the starting point of Black music over the course of the nineteenth century. After 1885, Congo Square could be considered as an established part of New Orleans folklore. Gradually the music that started there came to be identified as a central part of American identity.

This analysis aims to explore the indirect means by which the “invisible” manifests itself in Welty's Mississippi. Through this critical journey between her fiction and her photography, the intent is to define an “art of the trace” engendering a new vision of this river which courses its way through her work and upon which her Odyssean imagination wanders.

In O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Mystery Train the Coen brothers and Jim Jarmusch choose the state of Mississippi and the city of Memphis, Tennessee as the settings of their heroes' peregrinations. Music permeates Joel Coen's and Jim Jarmusch's cinematic spaces, so much that it influences their narrative and stylistic perspectives and structures their works. The aim of this paper is to examine how the Coen brothers' and Jarmusch's choice of the musical field as a territory for their reconstructions of the South enables them to collate distinct artistic domains and genres in their representations of “border incidents” between stories, legends and history.