Search Results

Mike Compton

Harry Bolick, Tony Russell, T. DeWayne Moore, Joyce A. Cauthen, and David Evans

in Fiddle Tunes from Mississippi: Commercial and Informal Recordings, 1920-2018

Mike Compton (1956- ), bluegrass mandolinist extraordinaire, was born in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1956. While he was growing up, he was the only musician in his family; however, on his paternal ... More

Mike Compton (1956- ), bluegrass mandolinist extraordinaire, was born in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1956. While he was growing up, he was the only musician in his family; however, on his paternal grandmother's side, the Galyeans had had a few dance musicians. In Nashville he began to work with former Bill Monroe sideman Hubert Davis. In the mid-1980s he joined the Nashville Bluegrass Band and played to great acclaim for four years. Next he joined John Hartford's string band, performing songs and tunes that catered to Hartford's passionate interest in old-time fiddle tunes. Mike played on six albums and toured extensively with the band until Hartford's death in 2001. Mike's other recording credits are extensive and impressive, but his most widely heard recording is as a member of the “Soggy Mountain Boys” on the Grammy-winning O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack.Less

Genealogy, History, and the Work Of Fiction

Jason K. Winfree

in Styles of Piety: Practicing Philosophy after the Death of God

Modern philosophy is increasingly concerned with the so-called genealogy of philosophical thought. This phenomenon begs the question of the genealogy of philosophy's ... More

Modern philosophy is increasingly concerned with the so-called genealogy of philosophical thought. This phenomenon begs the question of the genealogy of philosophy's genealogy. The book contends that such an undertaking can clarify not only the origins of specific discontinuities within the development of philosophical thought, but can actually bring about a new understanding of precisely those issues that constitute the “fracturing” of modern philosophy, i.e., its break with classical ideas and assumptions, and the creation of multiple avenues of thought. As such, this kind of genealogy not only clarifies the past, but also the present. The first third of the chapter focuses on how Kant explained the Enlightenment and its message regarding the place of morality and purpose in relation to history and philosophic development, and claims that the history “fractures”. The remaining third uses Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian to deconstruct Kant and posit the correctness of Nietzschean nihilism.Less

Alice Walker Matters: The Fruits of Gendered Space

Thadious M. Davis

in Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature

This final chapter deals with the vast body of Alice Walker's literary and political work. All her novels, especially The Color Purple, Meridian, and The Third Life of Grand Copeman are discussed in ... More

This final chapter deals with the vast body of Alice Walker's literary and political work. All her novels, especially The Color Purple, Meridian, and The Third Life of Grand Copeman are discussed in detail. Walker left the South in 1971, yet the South remained central in all her novels throughout the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, Walker rejected the label of southern writer.Less

Epilogue: “Desperate Conversation”—Poetic Finitude in Paul Celan and After

Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge

in Lyric Orientations: Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community

This epilogue examines Paul Celan's speech Der Meridian (The Meridian) to show how his poetry addressed the problems of finite subjectivity. The Meridian is a complex interweaving of references and ... More

This epilogue examines Paul Celan's speech Der Meridian (The Meridian) to show how his poetry addressed the problems of finite subjectivity. The Meridian is a complex interweaving of references and citations, most prominently to and of Georg Büchner, the German dramatist and pamphleteer. It particularly focuses on the conflict between “mutism's saying nothing” and “the saying too much of grandiloquence.” It describes both the uncanniness of art that seeks to transcend or overcome finitude, as well as the finitude itself that yearns for that impossible transcendence. In addition, it spoke of the dangers of the desire to overcome finitude: the absolutism and totalization that can follow from the search for what reaches beyond itself, and the endless self-perpetuation of the poetic techniques and traditions.Less

Poetry and Enlightenment: (Kant on Orientation, Whitman on the Brooklyn Ferry, Celan on the Meridian)

Allen Grossman

in True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing

This chapter discusses “enlightenment” as something that happens, that in fact has often happened. It argues that the traumatic enlightenment of the postwar world compelled recognition of the loss of ... More

This chapter discusses “enlightenment” as something that happens, that in fact has often happened. It argues that the traumatic enlightenment of the postwar world compelled recognition of the loss of the meaning-bearing body, and of the vulnerability of all bodies. Body here refers to the body that grounded Kant's confident orientation or Whitman's confiance au monde. The general function of the poem as stated in Celan's “Meridian,” is not to produce an artifact or delight an emperor, but to give birth in language to the possibility of orientation that requires that there be an East—to sing a new song, not by means of but toward a resurrection.Less

Civil Rights and the Southern Folk Aesthetic

Stephen Schryer

in Maximum Feasible Participation: American Literature and the War on Poverty

This chapter explores the persistence of community action as an ideal in post-1960s black feminist fiction, focusing on Alice Walker’s Meridian and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. Both writers ... More

This chapter explores the persistence of community action as an ideal in post-1960s black feminist fiction, focusing on Alice Walker’s Meridian and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. Both writers began their careers as social workers associated with War on Poverty programs; both were also influenced by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s version of community action, implemented during the 1964 Freedom Summer. In their novels, Walker and Bambara explore the legacy of the civil rights movement, focusing on intraracial class divisions that community action was supposed to suture. In both novels, these divisions turn out to be ineradicable, and their persistence marks the Southern folk aesthetic—the influential version of process art that Walker, Bambara, and other black feminist writers created in the 1970s.Less

“Not Another ‘Poetess’”: Feminist Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Poetry, and the Racialization of Suicide

Tricia Lootens

in The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres

This chapter examines struggles to define relations between “Victorian femininity” and racialized Poetess reception, focusing in particular on early, explicitly racialized meditations on the loss of ... More

This chapter examines struggles to define relations between “Victorian femininity” and racialized Poetess reception, focusing in particular on early, explicitly racialized meditations on the loss of African American Poetess figures. Drawing on foundational Second Wave feminist texts such as Ellen Moers's Literary Women, Cora Kaplan's Salt and Bitter and Good, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic, Erlene Stetson's Black Sister, and Cheryl Walker's Nightingale's Burden, the chapter investigates how early strains in Second Wave thinking came to define feminist criticism itself as a politicized mode of crisis intervention. It also considers how Frances Ellen Watkins Harper came to be barred, explicitly, from the category of “poetess” and concludes with a reading of Alice Walker's 1976 Poetess novel Meridian.Less

Paul Celan

Sonja Boos

in Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany: Toward a Public Discourse on the Holocaust

This chapter examines Paul Celan's explicitly antidialogical speeches and how they foreground the flaws and agonies of engaging in what Martin Buber terms a “genuine dialogue.” It reads Celan's 1960 ... More

This chapter examines Paul Celan's explicitly antidialogical speeches and how they foreground the flaws and agonies of engaging in what Martin Buber terms a “genuine dialogue.” It reads Celan's 1960 Büchner Prize address, titled The Meridian, as a metatext to Buber's classic philosophical work I and Thou. It considers Celan's rhetorical rejection of Buber's notion of dialogue and argues that the conceptual premise of Buber's dialogical philosophy is not tenable. If Buber's positively and optimistically constructive public speech enacts a genuine dialogue between himself and members of West Germany's public sphere, the chapter contends that Celan's negative response performs the sheer impossibility of reaching that audience.Less

Paradox resolved

I.S. Glass

in Nicolas-Louis De La Caille, Astronomer and Geodesist: South African Astronomical Observatory

Various scientists including Paolo Frisi, Henry Cavendish and William Mudge suspected that La Caille's geodetic result had been affected by local gravitational anomalies. George Everest, after whom ... More

Various scientists including Paolo Frisi, Henry Cavendish and William Mudge suspected that La Caille's geodetic result had been affected by local gravitational anomalies. George Everest, after whom Mount Everest is named, re-traced La Caille's steps in 1820 at the instigation of William Lambton, Superintendent of The Geodetic Survey of India. He concluded that the measurements had been distorted by the gravitational attraction of nearby mountains. Commencing about 1838, Thomas Maclear, Her Majesty's Astronomer at the Cape, repeated and extended the original survey, confirming that La Caille's latitude difference measurement were indeed in error by about 8.5 seconds of arc. With difficulty, he located the places that La Caille had worked from. He concluded that his measurement of the length of his arc of meridian was about 44m too great.Less

Behind the Lines

Earl J. Hess

in The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi

During the winter months of 1864, William Tecumseh Sherman sought to improve the Union position in Mississippi by tearing up the network of railroads centering on Meridian. This would disrupt ... More

During the winter months of 1864, William Tecumseh Sherman sought to improve the Union position in Mississippi by tearing up the network of railroads centering on Meridian. This would disrupt Confederate shipment of provisions from the state to their major armies and prevent the enemy from moving westward to Vicksburg and other Mississippi River towns.Less

Mandelshtam’s Meridian: On Paul Celan’s Aesthetic-Historical Materialism

Henry W. Pickford

in The Sense of Semblance: Philosophical Analyses of Holocaust Art

This chapter considers the influence of the Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam’s writings on the poetry and programmatic prose of Paul Celan against the background of two philosophers who read the ... More

This chapter considers the influence of the Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam’s writings on the poetry and programmatic prose of Paul Celan against the background of two philosophers who read the latter’s poetry as illustrating their respective theories of meaning and understanding: Jacques Derrida and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Against Derrida, and drawing on Wittgenstein and Gareth Evans, the chapter argues that Celan’s poems propose a historically contingent model of understanding that relies on collective name-using practices. Against Gadamer, it claims that Celan’s poems bear intrinsically evanescent and personal references that cannot be discounted from the meaning of the poems. Celan’s poems thus invoke the Holocaust by highlighting the precariousness of the communities of understanding upon which the poems themselves rely, by inscribing existential references within aesthetic semblance.Less

Unveiling the Jewelers’ Clock

Alexis McCrossen

in Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life

This chapter explores the history of timekeepers, focusing to their manufacturing, marketing, and acquisition, in order to chart certain points along the trajectory of modern time discipline. Before ... More

This chapter explores the history of timekeepers, focusing to their manufacturing, marketing, and acquisition, in order to chart certain points along the trajectory of modern time discipline. Before the Meridian time was established, jewelers and watchmakers held significant positions in society. Most of them asserted authority in the measurement and distribution of time. Their influence waned after the American Civil War, when the government slowly asserted their power in standardizing the regulation of time.Less

Reading Resistance: The Guerilla in Literature

Rychetta Watkins

in Black Power, Yellow Power, and the Making of Revolutionary Identities

This chapter applies the different facets of guerilla subjectivity—resistant, anticolonial, self-defined, self-determined, ideologically grounded, revolutionary agent—to a reading of Sam Greenlee’s ... More

This chapter applies the different facets of guerilla subjectivity—resistant, anticolonial, self-defined, self-determined, ideologically grounded, revolutionary agent—to a reading of Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969; 1990), Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976), and John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957; 1976). Greenlee’s novel is considered as an example of a stereotypical militant, revolutionary subjectivity. The novels by Walker and Okada are used to examine how these literary representations of the guerilla synthesize politics and aesthetics in a textual subject that complicates representations of blackness and yellowness, as well as revolution and resistance.Less

Evolution and Theodicy in Blood Meridian

Christopher Douglas

in If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right

This chapter reviews Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Its opening pages introduce the character of Judge Holden at an evangelical tent revival meeting held in Nacogdoches, Texas in 1849. The ... More

This chapter reviews Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Its opening pages introduce the character of Judge Holden at an evangelical tent revival meeting held in Nacogdoches, Texas in 1849. The anonymous protagonist of the novel, called only “the kid,” has slipped into Reverend Green's “nomadic house of God.” There, the kid hears the preacher describe the constancy of God's love. But evangelical invitation to be born again is interrupted by the judge who steps into the tent to address the audience with charges of imposture and iniquity. The novel relates to cases of pedophilia and bestiality in the 1980s. The period was known for regular scandals featuring fundamentalist and evangelical preachers, often situated in the South in what had been known as the Bible Belt.Less

Pendant: Celan, Büchner, and the Terrible Voice of the Meridian

Michael G. Levine

in A Weak Messianic Power: Figures of a Time to Come in Benjamin, Derrida, and Celan

The chapter focuses on the title Celan gave to his 1960 speech delivered on the occasion of his reception of the Büchner Prize for Literature. While critics tend to understand the title word ... More

The chapter focuses on the title Celan gave to his 1960 speech delivered on the occasion of his reception of the Büchner Prize for Literature. While critics tend to understand the title word “meridian” exclusively in spatial terms, the chapter argues that it should be understood temporally as the moment when the sun stands directly overhead at noon, dividing the day into a.m. and p.m. This moment recurs at critical points in Büchner’s plays and prose works and it is Celan’s achievement to have recognized its pivotal— and highly contradictory— significance. What is gathered together at this privileged point in time are three competing ways of viewing the meridian: as a moment of absolute sovereignty, as a point of stasis and traumatic fixation, and as the site of a possible opening toward what is yet to come. It is through his encounter with this critical moment in Büchner that Celan articulates his own poetic practice, his way not just of incorporating readings of other writers into his own work but of leaving his poems open in their turn to the solicitations of others. His notion of poetry as “desperate conversation” should thus be understood in terms of this intertextual relationship.Less

“We Must Return to the Dream”: Meridian, 1965–68

Araminta Stone Johnston

in And One Was a Priest: The Life and Times of Duncan M. Gray Jr.

This chapter describes events in Gray’s life from 1965 to 1968. These include the Grays’ move to Meridian, Mississippi; his new position as rector of St Paul’s; and Klan violence around Meridian.

Meridian Campaign: An Evolution and a Portent

Michael B. Ballard

in The Civil War in Mississippi: Major Campaigns and Battles

This chapter describes Sherman’s Meridian campaign. Sherman is credited for raising the level of hard war, beginning with the Meridian campaign. He chose to bring the war home to noncombatants, ... More

This chapter describes Sherman’s Meridian campaign. Sherman is credited for raising the level of hard war, beginning with the Meridian campaign. He chose to bring the war home to noncombatants, making them feel the pain and price of war, not by personal attacks but by destruction of food, railroads, and anything else that might provide support to Confederates. He believed that thought such destruction would break the will of Southerners and Confederate soldiers to carry on the war. He wanted to terrorize Southern whites to the point of making them want the war to end. However, the indiscriminate burning and wrecking of homes by Union troops was often unjustified, and in such cases went beyond his stated position.Less

Evening in America

Dan Sinykin

in American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse

James Baldwin’s observation that “American investments cannot be considered safe wherever the population cannot be considered tractable” could serve as a précis for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. ... More

James Baldwin’s observation that “American investments cannot be considered safe wherever the population cannot be considered tractable” could serve as a précis for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I show how McCarthy’s novel traces US scalp hunters in northern Mexico in the aftermath of the US-Mexican War as they clear the land of intractable Indians—i.e. slaughter them for cash—so the United States can pivot from settler colonialism to economic imperialism. The scalp hunters prove as bad for capital as the Indians they decimate, debauching cities, taking Mexican scalps that might pass as Indian, and destroying the means of production. Writing from late twentieth-century capitalist crisis, McCarthy depicts a constitutive violence that capitalism has unleashed, but cannot control. What remains, for McCarthy, beyond capitalism is the excess that fells it, a drive to violence.Less

Living Punctuations: Cixous and Celan

David Wills

in Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life

How does breathing relate to the punctuation, or absence of punctuation of writing, and in particular of poetry? That question is examined through the work of Hélène Cixous and in Paul Celan’s ... More

How does breathing relate to the punctuation, or absence of punctuation of writing, and in particular of poetry? That question is examined through the work of Hélène Cixous and in Paul Celan’s Meridian address.Less