TWAIN-L Archives

Mark Twain Forum

TWAIN-L@YORKU.CA

Options: Use Classic View

Use Proportional Font
Show Text Part by Default
Condense Mail Headers

Topic: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]

Print Reply
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: Mark Twain Forum <[log in to unmask]>
From: Barbara Ladd <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 17:04:45 -0400
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
MIME-Version: 1.0
Reply-To: Mark Twain Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Parts/Attachments: text/plain (20 lines)
Dear Twainiacs,

Whenever I teach "Old Times on the Mississippi," I am invariably
presented with a paper on "the Mississippi River as a character" in the
text--it's seldom a very good paper, but the idea seems to have
incredible currency among undergraduates. A quick internet search
reveals several sites that refer to "many people" having said that the
river is like a character, but it seems to me that I once possessed a
citation to an essay on that subject written many years ago; I can find
no record of it now. Does anyone out there know where this interest in
the river as a "character" originated? Of course, Mark Twain, himself,
refers to the river as being like a book and there is the wonderful
allusion to a pilot's reading the river as comparable to a doctor's
being able to read disease in the flush of beauty's cheek, but I don't
recall that Mark Twain himself described the river as a character--at
least not in "Old Times."

Many thanks,
Barbara

ATOM RSS1 RSS2