Cultural Criticism in Mark Twain s Life on the Mississippi Essays

Cultural Criticism in Mark Twain s Life on the Mississippi Essays Cultural Criticism in Mark Twain s Life on the Mississippi Essay Cultural Criticism in Mark Twain s Life on the Mississippi Essay amounts of goods hipped, but these facts, though they demonstrate useful information about the river, do not show how knowledge ought to be used. The way knowledge ought to be used is part of the cub pilots training, a knowledge that becomes intuitive, almost instinctual and unconscious. -The new river that Twain explores has changed so much so that modern technology has knocked the romance out of piloting. Lamps have been installed along the river; snag boats clear the river from hazard. -The knowledge required in 1882 to be a riverboat pilot now lies in charts devised by Horace Boxy and George Ritchie, ND not in the memory banks of the pilot. Uncle uniforms monologue: They wanted the water to go one way, the water wanted to go another -fear of disappearance of the noble landmarks -Knowledge that ass been stored has become useless -Changes that have occurred along the river since the Civil War: Twain intents to explain the corruption of the South before the Civil War and the decay of the Southern culture, still dependent on that form of knowledge, after the great War between the States C] Most of these changes have been economic -Clearly, L Mississippi is a record of the destruction of the South, even if it remises to be a remembrance of the life that Twain Once had on the banks of the river -Since the moment Hernandez De Sotto and his party of conquistadores first arrived at the banks of the Mississippi in 1 541 m travelers of every variety have flocked to and along this representative river to better comprehend the country thorough which it flows. Both as a conduit for trade and travel, and a destination in its own righ t, the rivers role in national life has changed dramatically over the centuries. It no longer commands the social and economic powers of its antebellum zenith. Nevertheless, it mutinous to occupy a unique place in American travel writing and the American consciousness. -T. S. Eliot appreciated the rivers powers even William Least Heat-Moon, a child of the Missouri who has attempted in his own eatable to testify to the capital allure Of rivers other than the Mississippi, has conceded its encompassing mystique that still hold us in a grand cultural thrall. The Mississippi remains a vital location in the symbolic geography of America. -Mark Twain understood the rivers symbolic nature. He was taught the lesson while learning to pilot a steamboat on the Mississippi; what he learned remains fundamental for successfully piloting a course through the rivers manifold representations. He came to understand that there were to rivers: The physical Mississippi of the imagination, meandering through the mind. For a steamboat pilot, the imagined Mississippi rook precedence. Horace Boxy Twains piloting mentor, instructed him: you can always steer by the shape thats in your head, and never mind the one thats before your eyes The story of Mississippi travel writing can, in one sense , quickly be told in an apparently circular list of its hanging modes Of transport. The canoes Of those attempting to navigate the rivers course today. If each eras travel writing had been defined by a mode of transport, its concomitant relationship with the river has been profoundly different. The river has also been an enigma and an emblem of imperialism. The essential highway of a young nation moving west; the real of profit, increasing arbitration, slavery, and war; a limbo of lost splendor and increasing dismissal; the scene of imaginative resurrection; an escape route to a forgotten America; and, today, an arena in which to test personal limits. The most significant accounts of the Mississippi have been able to assess the river with a profound awareness of its history, and yet still see it with acute, contemporary eyes -The early travel accounts that resulted severe a double role: they fueled imperial desire, and the established certain paradigmatic relationships between the travelers and the river. Broken dreams and ruined fortunes soon littered its banks -Charles Dickens was disappointed expected more -The river, already under serve pressure from the railroads in the sass, was arced to close its waters at the advent of the Civil War. Travel writing was displaced by military dispatch -When the river was again opened for freight a nd passenger traffic, it flowed through a very different landscape. Slavery was gone, the railroads Were dominant, and the steamboat trade was suffering from mortal wounds -The rivers cultural life was about to begin anew: all because the Civil War forced a young steamboat pilot in the trades last flush years. Then he headed West and became Mark Twain -He was the only one back then who wrote about the Mississippi -first 3 chapters deal with geography and the rivers history; after those follow the chapters of the pilot- memories.