Professor's House Research Articles

Gender, race, and mourning in American modernism

Introduction 1. Gender, melancholy, and the whiteness of impersonal form in The Great Gatsby 2. Redeeming violence in The Sun Also Rises: phallic embodiment, primitive ritual, fetishistic melancholia 3. Versions of traumatic melancholia: the burden of white man's history in Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! 4. The Professor's House: primitivist melancholy and the gender of Utopian forms Afterword Index.

Your ID, please? the Henry Gates vs. James Crowley event from an anthropological perspective

In the modern world, ID papers are those indispensable objects without which we cannot prove we are who we say we are. We need material proof to attest to our identification. The central ethnographic event of this paper took place in July 2009 with the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. by the police of the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, after a passer-by reported that someone was breaking of the entrance door of a house which, it soon transpired, was the professor's own house. From the analysis of this episode three mechanisms of classification and singularization are revealed, namely "recognition," "identification," and "profiling."

Sacred Spaces, Profane "Manufactories": Willa Cather's Split Artist in The Professor's House and My Mortal Enemy

In keeping with the idea that Cather herself located the "fountainhead" of her creative energies in "Nebraska and points west" ( In Person 88), I wish to locate my discussion of Cather's novels, The Professor's House and My Mortal Enemy , in the symbolic landscapes which help reveal their position in her oeuvre. My article argues that Godfrey St. Peter and Myra Henshawe, like Cather herself at this point in her career, attempt to navigate the tensions of two forces simultaneously working on them. That is, Godfrey's and Myra's authentic artistic selves strive to resist the pull toward fame, money, and recognition that Cather herself was newly acquiring at this point in her career and likely trying to accommodate to those artistic pursuits she considered high and pure. These novels can be read as Cather's fictional attempt to address the temptations and struggles she felt in her own life, specifically at a point when she was very critical of America's "pathetic" absence of artistic "discrimination" ( In Person 70) in matters of art and culture. My article adds to the scope of Cather criticism in particular as it points readers to a new look at Myra Henshawe as a potentially noble, albeit flawed, artist figure striving for spiritual purity in the face of material profanity.

Conveniently Situated Museums: The House Museum Movement and Modernist Interiority in Willa Cather's The Professor's House

Conveniently Situated Museums: The House Museum Movement and Modernist Interiority in Willa Cather's The Professor's House

Willa Cather and the Pentecostal Novel

‘The Novel Démeublé’ is Willa Cather's most influential and, for all its plain-spokenness, most enigmatic statement of the principles of her novelistic art. ‘How wonderful,’ she writes, ‘it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window; and along with it, all the meaningless reiterations concerning physical sensations, all the tiresome old patterns, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre, or as that house into which the glory of Pentecost descended …’ Cather insists not just on ridding the house of fiction of its superfluous and meaningless clutter, but in stripping it bare – an indication of the drastic narrative and spiritual economies she deems essential to its artistic integrity and, indeed, survival. This essay explores what is demanded and what is foreseen in Cather's call for a radical divestiture of the novel's traditional furnishings by attending to that concluding image of the novel démeublé as a Pentecostal chamber in which numinous reality is translated into the common tongue. Such novelistic miracles are not only possible but necessary to the moral and historical realism of her two finest novels, Death Comes to the Archbishop and The Professor's House.

"Terrible Women": Gender, Platonism, and Christianity in Willa Cather's The Professor's House

"Terrible Women": Gender, Platonism, and Christianity in Willa Cather's The Professor's House

An Introduction to Neonativist Collectives: Place, Not Race, in Cather's The Professor's House and Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent

An Introduction to Neonativist Collectives: Place, Not Race, in Cather's The Professor's House and Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent

Artistic Excision and Scientific Production in Cather's THE PROFESSOR's HOUSE

The interpenetration of art, religion, and technology is the site of much discussion in Willa Cather's The Professor's House (1925). What John Hilgart has seen as this novel's staged weighing up of...

American Naturalism and the Jews: Garland, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, and Cather (review)

Reviewed by: American Naturalism and the Jews: Garland, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, and Cather Jennie A. Kassanoff American Naturalism and the Jews: Garland, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, and Cather, by Donald Pizer. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 112 pp. $30.00. Donald Pizer's lively and succinct American Naturalism and the Jews: Garland, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, and Cather explores a riddle that has long dogged scholars of American literary naturalism: how could writers whose reformist politics were otherwise so liberal indulge in the crude semantics of antisemitism? What are we to do with repugnant characters like Zerkow, the pathologically greedy Jewish junk dealer in Frank Norris's McTeague (1899) or Simon Rosedale, the oily, assimilated Wall Street financier in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905)? How are we to square the sneering antisemitic asides that stained Theodore Dreiser's later career with the iconic strivers (Carrie Meeber, Clyde Griffiths) who had made him famous? For Pizer, an emeritus professor at Tulane, and the author of The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism (1993) along with numerous essays on Dreiser, Dos Passos, Wharton, and Norris, such examples are not merely symptoms of the author's [End Page 208] "psychological misalignment," but also evidence of a more pervasive "state of mind" that bound midwestern Populists and northeastern nativists at the turn of the twentieth century in common cause against their shared phantasm: the dangerously un-American Jew. Drawing on his deep familiarity with the letters, essays, stories, and novels of his subjects, Pizer maps a literary terrain whose borders were both marked and menaced by a uniform group of Shylocks and Svengalis. Pizer suggests that two key events in the 1890s catalyzed Naturalist antisemitism: the Populist farmer's revolt in the agrarian midwest and the wave of impoverished eastern-European Jews that transformed urban centers like New York. Populists promulgated conspiracy theories in which an "international gold ring" of British banks and Jewish bankers were determined to suck the honest American farmer dry (p. 4). By the 1920s, Henry Ford had revived the agrarian anti-semitism that, in the 1890s, had been promulgated by midwestern personalities like Ignatius Donnelly and Mary Elizabeth Lease. Ford's dissemination of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a spurious nineteenth-century publication that disclosed an international Jewish plot to control the world's finances, influenced writers like Garland and Dreiser, who shared Ford's paranoid provincialism. At the same time, Norris and Wharton were responding to new urban immigration patterns by relying on a toxic combination of social Darwinism and prurient Orientalism. For the majority of America's Naturalists, however, antisemitism seemed less a coherent ideology than a crude expedient that could explain any perceived injustice, large or small. Convinced, for example, that he had been cheated by a cabal of Jewish publishers, filmmakers, and lawyers, Dreiser made no secret of his contempt for his Jewish associates: "The Jew an eternal defender of Justice? Bunk!" he insouciantly told San Francisco's Jewish Journal in 1930. "Jews have always crybabied about Justice, but what they want is Justice for themselves—a special and particularly pro-Jewish Justice. That's not Justice!" Likewise, Willa Cather frequently depicted Jews as unproductive if inevitable parasites on the American heartland (witness both Ivy Peters in A Lost Lady [1924] and Louie Marcellus in The Professor's House [1926]). Cather's prejudices were rooted in her prairie upbringing and supported by personal grievance (Pizer speculates that she may have resented the Jewish musician Jan Hambourg who married her long-time companion Isabelle McClung.) In each of these cases, Pizer reveals an otherwise insightful American author for whom the Jew was either a gross blind spot or a dangerously convenient whipping boy in an era of economic and social change. Although Pizer's historical approach is a welcome one (he acknowledges that past critics, more often than not, have either looked the other way or [End Page 209] dismissed America's homegrown literary antisemitism as a matter of personal idiosyncrasy or genteel norms), his account leaves a few key questions unanswered. The Populist moment and the immigration wave may unearth the context in which antisemitism flourished, but...

Possessing Culture: Willa Cather's Composition of Culture inThe Song of the LarkandThe Professor's House

<b>Possessing Culture: Willa Cather's Composition of Culture in</b><i>The Song of the Lark</i><b>and</b><i>The Professor's House</i>

Determining How Readers Responded to Cather's Fiction: The Cultural Work of The Professor's House in Collier's Weekly

When copies of the Collier's Weekly maga zine issue dated June 6, 1925 arrived in mailboxes and on news stands across the United States, purchasers were confronted with a cover image that was both puzzling and unusually dark and mysteri ous for the magazine: a gaunt, dark-skinned man sporting a goatee and mustache, wearing a weird type of red headgear, with two rather suspi cious men and two women peering out from behind him (Figure 1). only thing prospective readers knew for certain was that the image was in some way connected to a fiction announced by large black type at the bottom of the cover: The Professor's House A NEW NOVEL by WILLA CATHER. What did Collier's readers make of this cover? More

&lt;i&gt;The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism Cindy Murillo The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism. Florence Dore. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. ix+167. $50.00 (cloth). In The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism, Florence Dore sets out to redefine our current understanding of obscenity laws' impact on the modern novel. This relatively short book covers a lot of ground. As Dore points out in her introduction, many scholars tend to read literature as informed by law, which serves as "the historical key that will unlock the ambiguous literary text" (10). At the turn into the twentieth century, issues regarding free speech contributed to the weakening of obscenity laws and modernist texts were regarded as part and parcel of this ultimate rejection of sexual prudery with their forthright explicitness of sexuality. Dore, however, challenges such assumptions through a re-positioning of silence, what the author terms a "negative narration" (2), that resists sexual explicitness and conversely reproduces censorship. In this respect, Dore's book is unique in that she suggests that modern novels convey silence at the moment of what appears on the surface to be an explicitly sexual scene. Dore begins her argument by drawing on Michel Foucault, whose theoretical contributions have also questioned law as the primary characteristic of power. She dismisses other critical assumptions that associate Foucault's concepts of power with a culturally constructed text, which limit our understanding of the novel in purely socio-political terms. Placing herself within the framework of Marxist, psychoanalytic, and feminist thought, she revises these theories to fit her purpose. Dore relocates cultural influence onto the notion of a "phallic logic" (5), demonstrating that Marxist terminology can't completely explain the reaffirmation of conventional gendered categories during a time considered sexually progressive. Theoretical assertions of sexuality are read into the discussed texts, which show how gender categories, and thus a "phallic logic," persist regardless of the emergence of free speech and the weakening of obscenity laws at the turn [End Page 195] of the twentieth century. This ideology works against feminist scholars, such as Elaine Showalter, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, to name only a few, who have asserted that the modern novel was preoccupied with gender and can be seen as giving rise to a new and assertive femininity. Conversely, Dore sees these feminist theories as misconstrued. To demonstrate her theory, Dore examines four modernist works, Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), Willa Cather's The Professor's House (1925), William Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931), and Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), and she looks at how sexuality is mollified at points which might be considered obscene. Her discussion centers around three obscenity cases—Queen v. Hicklin (1868), which established as obscene a text that could "corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" (12); U.S. v. One Book Called "Ulysses" (1933), which renamed obscene material as that which could potentially cause "lustful thoughts" in a "person of average sex instincts" (12); and the infamous phrase spoken by Justice Potter Stewart in 1964, "'I know it when I see it.'"(15). Her justification for using these modern novels in her analysis is based on their historical status as openly illicit in terms of sexual representation whether heterosexual, homosexual, or interracial. Dore's book is broken into two sections: Knowing and Seeing, the first two chapters devoted to issues of obscenity law and knowledge, and the later two chapters concerned with analyzing obscenity with respect to sight. In her analysis of Sister Carrie, Dore conceptualizes the sexuality rendered absent in terms of Carrie's stupidity and Ames's inability to associate Carrie's body with anything sexual. Drawing on both Hicklin and One Book's definitions of obscenity, the author argues that the descriptions of Carrie's emotions undermine any attempt on Carrie's part to demonstrate the ability to reason. Dore asserts that "Carrie's move away from morality delivers her into a physical realm that reproduces feminine sexual innocence as innocence of mind" (31). Sexual freedom is not unleashed; rather, Carrie is unable to achieve independent subjectivity...

Willa Cather and Material Culture: Real World Writing, Writing the Real World by Janis P. Stout

MLR, I02.2, 2007 495 culture?), the emerging of these questions from inside a narrative of such masterful particularity does insist that theorykeep an eye on thegrittyand perhaps disappoint ingoutcomes of the real.We can only respectVicinus's ability to insiston these ques tions because we can, I think,only look at her rendering of somany histories of loves between women with respect, admiration, and something at times approaching awe. UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS DENIS FLANNERY Willa Cather andMaterial Culture: Real World Writing,Writing the Real World. Ed. by JANISP. STOUT. Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press. 2005. ix+ 240 pp. $37.50. ISBN 978-o-8173-I436-I. A collection of essays on the role ofmaterial objects in Willa Cather's lifeand work may seem odd. After all, Cather is best known forher interest in nature and open spaces, and she isalso theauthor of 'The Novel Demeuble', which called forthe stage of thenovel tobe freeof clutter, for the fictionalworld tobe freeof the accumulation of objects that distract real, ordinary lives.Yet Janis P. Stout has brought together a collection of ten essays that for themost part rise to the challenge of scrutinizing the objects thatdo appear inCather's fiction,and drawing useful conclusions about the author's status in themodernist canon, and about her attitudes to the cultural significance of these highlighted objects, which the editor describes as 'ingredients and traces' of human identity,history, and culture. The firstfour essays in thevolume could perhaps be seen as theweaker part of the collection, but read in relation to the rest of the book, they do provide some useful ways of placing Cather's work in a larger cultural context. An illustrated essay on the significance of quilts inCather's lifeand writing, especially Sapphira, brings together notions of female creative expression and a female-centred tradition. Continuing on the theme ofCather's contribution to a female tradition, thenext two essays concen trateon herwritings for Home Monthly and Women's Home Companion, attempting to reconcile Cather's depictions of strong female characters with thosemagazines' pro motion of thewoman as docile homemaker. Here perhaps one detects the scholar's reluctance to condemn her object of study: though JenniferL. Bradley concedes that Cather had to 'adapt the style and content of her writing tomatch themagazine's editorial policy' (p. 63), the relationship between artistic integrity and commercial pressure remains underdeveloped. The theme ispicked up again in the chapter that deals with the I934 filmadaptation ofA Lost Lady, which also usefully suggests that li terary textswere themselves becoming 'more complex asmaterial objects, exploitable innumerous ways' (p. I 13) by the film industry and the consuming public. The second half of thevolume offersamore complex and rewarding consideration ofCather's fiction,drawing on anthropology and social history aswell as theories of material culture. Again, though, there is a tendency to iron out difficulties, coupled with a reluctance to consider Cather's fiction in awider literaryand critical context. Anne Raine reads The Professor's House as 'an ambivalent response to the recognition that [... .]nature is material culture' (p. 125), but her argument issomewhat weakened when she goes on to defend Cather's attitudes toNative Americans, while Deborah Lindsay Williams's essay similarly offers a too generous and forgiving account of Cather's racial portraits. The essay on the female consumer and commodity culture inA Lost Lady and The Professor's House best exemplifies both the strengths and the limitations of this collection: though the reading of the twonovels clearly shows that a consideration of 'material culture' does illuminate the texts under discussion, the essay also suffers from a blinkered approach. No literaryantecedents arementioned (one thinks of Emma Bovary, who shopped toomuch, and Isabel Archer, who did 496 Reviews not shop at all), and littleuse ismade of existing criticism on female consumerism in early twentieth-centuryAmerica. In fairness, itshould be noted that the essays in thisvolume are all rather short, so any narrowness of scope may be attributed to space limitations. Though the editorial decision to keep the essays brief allows for a variety of approaches that yield often exciting interpretations ofCather's work, one is left wanting more: more on Cather's place in literaryhistory, and more on the relationship between...

The Cambridge Companion to Willa Gather ed. by Marilee Lindemann, and Willa Cather and Material Culture: Real-World Writing, Writing the Real World ed. by Janis P. Stout

4 6 2 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e W in t e r 2 0 0 7 and perspectives that inhabit these changing western spaces. Tara Penry speaks to the use ofsentiment to eulogize and energize in her chapter on “Sentimental Eco-Memoir” that examines the cultural work of Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge (1992) and William Kittredge’s Hole in the Sky (1992). Penry includes both Tom Lyon’sconcern with “loss of space, quietness and wildness” and Ray Gonzalez’s alarm at El Paso’s “rapid urban decay” and “disappearing deserts” (342). The capacious range of diverse texts within Western Subjects, coupled with interdisciplinary perspectives from an impressive array of scholars, mirrors the cacophony ofpostmodern conversation held daily in these Wests. In these places, lifewriters and scholars conduct their productive, contentious, forwardlooking , backward-glancing debates. The Cambridge Companion to W illa Gather. Edited by Marilee Lindemann. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 229 pages, $65.00/$24-99. W illa Cather and Material Culture: ReaUWorld Writing, Writing the Real World. Edited by Janis P. Stout. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. 240 pages, $37.50. Reviewed by Evelyn I. Funda Utah State University, Logan The mark of an important writer is that his or her work responds well to an evolving variety of critical approaches, and Willa Cather’s fiction, over the last decades, has been made fresh again and again by scholars studying her in terms ofgender, regionalism, modernism, politics, and soon. The two collected editions presently under review suggest that approaching Cather from material culture and cultural studies perspectives can be equally profitable. To demonstrate, as has Janis Stout’ s collection, that concrete objects in Cather’sfiction “are both ingredients and traces ofhuman identity, human his­ tory, and human culture” or to posit, as does Marilee Lindemann’scollection, that Cather was “an acute observerofAmerican life whose deeplyfelt responses to changing social and demographic conditions are illuminating both for what they celebrate and for what they evade or repress” suggests new frontiers for Cather studies, even ones that challenge Cathers own statements about her work (1, 3). After all, wasn’t it Cather herself who claimed in her essay “The Novel Demeuble ” that the novel needed to be “defumished” of all the things that tended to muddle up the scenery; wasn’t it Cather who suffered the taunt of “escapist” because, as she had written in “Escapism,” she was committed to the idea that it was not the duty of the writer or artist to directly address the social ills of a nation, for to do so would only turn them into propagandists? Yet without directly contradicting Cather’s stated beliefs, the writers in these two volumes manage to prove, indeed, how evocative and rich material objects BO O K R E VIE W S 4 6 3 and cultural contexts are within Cather’swritings and to showhow teasing out these threads proves Cather was a writer fully participating in her culture and its intellectual framework. The eleven writers in Stout’sWilla Cather and Material Culture consider a fascinating variety of items. They point out, for instance, that the Cather family quilts from Virginia symbolically replicate the central tensions of Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), or they trace the extent of young Cather’s efforts as the managing editor of The Home Monthly to carry out or challenge the magazine’scommercial and editorial goals in its efforts to commodify man­ ners among a rising middle class. Other contributors outline Cather’sfight to maintain control of her literary reputation amidst the film industry’s filming and packaging of novels like A Lost Lady (1923) or read The Professor's House (1925) as “an ambivalent response to the recognition that in the twentieth century, nature is material culture: not virgin territory, but a set of social dis­ courses and practices, including images and advertisements, roads and railways, scientific documents and National Park Service policies, tourist facilities and museum exhibits” (125) or propose that a desert juniper tree or a silver bell in a church tower, as well as other...

Catherian Friendship; or, How Not To Do the History of Homosexuality

While critics often regard Cather's male friendships as the closeted voicing of lesbian desire, this essay suggests that these intimate same-sex relations are rather uninterested in modern U.S. sexual identity. To do so, it charts how Cather's men refuse the movement from friendship to homosexuality in order to wreck the designs of a legible sexual history, and to fracture the historical march from passionate same-sex friendship to urban gay subculture. Focusing on The Professor's House, it views these deliberate failures of sexual expression as beneficial outcomes of her regional male bonds.

Canonical Relations: Willa Cather, America, and The Professor's House

The first of these observations, both made by James Schroeter in his introduction to the Recent Views section of Willa Cather and her Critics, published in 1967, could still pass as majority opinion. Those critics who do work on Cather routinely lament their own, and Cather 's, continued exclusion from the main currents of American literature as measured by canon-forming syllabi, anthologies, or magisterial pronouncements of American literary greatness. However, there now is a Willa Cather industry. This is evidenced on the one hand by the fact that, great or not, Cather is in a continual condition of reappropriation at the hands of readers of various persuasions, and on the other by the luxuriant growth of Catherland, the real and imaginary location centered around Red Cloud, Nebraska, where devoted Catherites go to immerse themselves in theme park versions of the immigrant pioneer dream. That there is now no contradiction between industrial levels of criti-

Collegiality and Academic Community

Collegiality and Academic Community Joseph R. Urgo (bio) The Ecology of Intellectual Work When working, administrators may well think about persons and human relationships as often as professors think about ideas. Professors have their students to consider, of course, but what we commonly refer to as the faculty member's "own work" is the research and writing consequent to the manipulation of ideas. Administrators who continue to do academic work may admit to pre-dawn or nocturnal forays back into their scholarship. But when a member of the academic administration, Provost, Dean, or Department Chair, is on the job, the work he or she does concerns, above all else, the human relationships that make up the institution. Committees are appointed, funds are allocated, reviews are conducted, projects are supported, rewards are given or withheld, and in each instance what is foremost in mind are the human consequences of these decisions. Emblematically, an administrator must know the people involved. Compare to this the emblem of the faculty's faith in ideas, the blind submission. Essays arrive on the associate editor's desk without attribution; publication is blind, contingent solely on quality. The practice assures that ideas, not individuals, drive the field of inquiry. Blind administration, on the other hand, is so unthinkable as to be humorous, where nearly every decision made hinges upon the contingencies of personnel. An administrative appointment, moreover, is half job description (typically by vague and tenuous language) and half personality. In practice, the person shapes the office and the personality drives the work. Collegiality, the suggestion that we recognize and even enforce certain communal, behavioral norms, is the creation of the administrative mind, arising out of the conditions of administrative work, and in direct response to recent trends in the doing of academic work which discourages community. Every subaltern administrator serves, in the common language of such appointments, "at the pleasure" of his or her superior. Chairs serve at the pleasure of Deans; Deans serve at the pleasure of Provosts. [End Page 30] Implicit in the phrase is the notion of administrative collegiality, and it signals an agreement, ipso facto, that the work conducted by administrators is the work of, by, and for the good will of persons. If the Chair continually displeases the Dean, he is dismissed, and he returns to the faculty, where the pleasure clause is outranked by tenure. Faculty members do not serve at the pleasure of department chairs, deans, or anyone else. The notion is unthinkable to the point of being satirical. Faculty members serve at their own pleasure; they work not with personalities but with ideas, contributing not to happiness nor even to contentedness but to the production of knowledge. The stereotypical absent-minded professor, in worn clothing, a little ditzy when it comes to practical matters, inept with social graces—the image implies cognitive brilliance and residence in a world apart from the more pedestrian existence of those who reside below. To describe the birth of an intellectual, the emergence of a young mind out of the world of material things and into to the world of ideas, Willa Cather created a scene of student's ascent onto the top of a mesa, and a discovery there of an entirely new way of being, an ascent into "a world above the world" (217). The Professor's House (1925) creates a portrait of such an individual, at odds with family and colleagues, taken to task by his wife for his "intolerance" (24)—not of anyone or anything in particular, but for the material predicaments of existence generally. "Well, the habit of living with ideas grows on one," the professor tells his wife, in response to accusations of anti-social behavior (141). For Cather's professor, the "vivid consciousness" of ideas is "the realest of his lives," dating back to his first conception of himself as a sentient being, so much so that "all the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside," and not from within, where his real life resides. "His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him" (240). Cather's professor quarrels with...

Interpersonal Relations

Interpersonal Relations Tony Hilfer Each of the four essays in this issue examines the depiction of interpersonal relations: as possibility, threat, absence, and erasure of boundaries. John Bruns's ethically engaged and engaging essay on James's "The Beast in the Jungle" invokes Bakhtin as a champion of "the open structure of dialogue," an opening specifically to "the surplus of the other," an other who "should surprise us, not reaffirm who we are." However, Maya Wakana, writing on The Wings of the Dove also sees self as formed via interpersonal relations, building on Erving Goffman's brilliantly paranoiac social psychology to show how such interaction continually negotiates psychic and social survival in a collision (sometimes collusion) of "felt stigmatizations." The social moment ends by controlling and limiting rather than allowing for possibility and, in sum, seems rather Hobbesian, a zero sum game for everyone playing it. In contrast to both of these essays, Anna Wilson reads Cather's The Professor's House as a disengagement from various critical projects—traditionalist, modernist, queering—that attempt to insert her into their versions of canonical structures. Cather even disengages from modernist disengagement, a triumph of averting the "trap of interpretation." Her novel calculatedly avoids socialization. Finally, Susann Cokal analyzes Fitzgerald's analysis of an analyst, the psychoanalyst Dick Diver of Tender Is the Night. Here there is a mess of interpersonality as when Dick and Nicole merge (before fissionating) into the joint self, Dicole. Along with Rosemary and Nicole's father, they form a daisy chain of father-daughter-lover that can only lead to a disastrous meltdown of roles and selves. Selves are formed by relations but evidently need their distances. Copyright © 2005 University of Texas Press

Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War (review)

Reviewed by: Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War Janis P. Stout (bio) Steven Trout, Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. ix + 225 pp. $40 (cloth). Willa Cather's fourth and surely most widely read novel My Ántonia (1918) was nominated for the newly established Pulitzer Prize but was not selected. Her next novel, the frequently vilified One of Ours (1922), was nominated and won—a fact that has sometimes been cited by critics wishing to make a point about the nature of the Pulitzer Prize. Steven Trout rejects the assumption on which such citations of the prize for One of Ours are based—that is, the assumption that it is an inferior, even inept novel. On the contrary, Trout regards it as a subtly nuanced, modernistically fragmented and conflicted work. Rejecting both the traditional view that it is an idealistic, even naive, celebration of militarism and the more recently ascendant view that it is "an ironic unmasking of military romanticism," he argues that One of Ours is instead an examination of "the paradoxical nature of war and the idealism it inspires" (53). To establish this argument, Trout provides a valuable and informative grounding in the Great War rhetoric that would have been familiar to Cather's contemporary readers and in what he calls the "culture of commemoration" (34) in which the novel participates and which it ultimately calls into question. It is this aspect of Memorial Fictions that is its greatest strength. Certainly Trout is not the first to identify the fractured nature of Cather's language, narrative point of view, and apparent intention in One of Ours, but he is the first to argue such a judgment of the novel in so historically grounded a way. The [End Page 95] contextual information provided by his readings of the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and the reburial rituals honoring G. P. Cather, the cousin after whom Cather modeled her main character, will be extremely useful not only to Cather scholars but to others working on the literary and social effects of World War I more largely. In a lengthy chapter called "Cather and Combat," Trout tackles head-on the critical carping that has dogged the author's heels for having presumed to trespass on the male preserve of writing directly about combat. Such criticism was initially launched by several particularly influential reviews, especially H. L. Mencken's sexist charge, in Smart Set, that the war section of the novel approximates "the level of a serial in The Lady's [sic] Home Journal" and that its combat is "fought out, not in France, but on a Hollywood movie-lot" (quoted by Trout, 106). One wonders if Ernest Hemingway was remembering this last bit when he wrote his notorious letter to Edmund Wilson, in 1923, sneering that the final "scene in the lines" came directly from the "battle scene in Birth of a Nation" (Carlos Baker, ed., Ernest Hemingway's Selected Letters [New York: Scribner, 1981], 105). Once again Trout provides a sampling of contemporary materials not now familiar, such as a parody of the novel published in Literary Review in February 1923, and he perceptively identifies parallels between One of Ours and such texts as D. H. Lawrence's "The Prussian Officer," Emile Zola's La Débâcle, Joseph Conrad's "Youth," and the citation that accompanied G. P. Cather's posthumous award of the Distinguished Service Cross. Strikingly, he points out that the novel's perpetuation of an American "Myth of the Last Stand" links it, indeed, with the supposedly "most realistic war film ever made," Saving Private Ryan—a film that also "demonstrates that the romantic appeal of fighting to the last man is alive and well" (145). Also interesting, though perhaps not to be listed among the study's primary strengths, is its chapter on Cather's The Professor's House, a text that the Great War "inhabits (or haunts)" (150). To be sure, Trout's assertion of such a haunting is sound enough, but he pursues the argument with a zeal that occasionally leads him into conjectures and...

Legacy Bookshelf

Below is a selected sampling of current books, articles, and dissertations relevant to the study of American women writers from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries. Prices unless otherwise indicated are for hardcover editions. Individual Authors Adams, Hannah Everton, Michael J. "The Courtesies of Authorship: Hannah Adams and Authorial Ethics in the Early Republic." Legacy 20 (2003): 1-21. Alcott, Louisa May Deese, Helen R., ed. "Memoranda and Documents: Louisa May Alcott's Moods: A New Archival Discovery." New England Quarterly 76 (2003): 439-55. Bishop, Elizabeth Costello, Bonnie. "Elizabeth Bishop's Impersonal Personal." American Literary History 15 (2003): 334-66. Bonner, Sherwood McKee, Kathryn B. "'Honey, Yer Ain't Harf as Smart as Yer Thinks Yer Is!': Race and Humor in Sherwood Bonner's Short Fiction." Southern Literary Journal 35.1 (2002): 28-46. Cather, Willa See also the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter. Elz, A. Elizabeth. "The Awakening and A Lost Lady: Flying with Broken Wings and Raked Feathers." Southern Literary Journal 35.2 (2003): 13-27. Kot, Paula. "Speculation, Tourism, and The Professor's House." Twentieth-Century Literature 48 (2002): 393-426. Kuhlken, Pam Fox. "Hallowed Ground: Landscape as Hagiography in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop." Christianity and Literature 52 (2003): 367-85. Ryan, Melissa. "The Enclosure of America: Civilization and Confinement in Willa Cather's O Pioneers!." American Literature 75 (2003): 275-303. Sánchez, María Carla. "Immovable: Willa Cather's Logic of Art and Place." Western American Literature 38 (2003): 117-30. Stich, Klaus P. "Historical and Archetypal Intimations of the Grail Myth in Cather's One of Ours and The Professor's House." TSLL: Texas Studies in Literature and Language 45 (2003): 201-30. Wilson, Sarah. "'Fragmentary and Inconclusive' Violence: National History and Literary Form in The Professor's House." American Literature 75 (2003): 571-99. Childress, Alice Hawkins, Alfonso W. "The Nurture of African American Youth in the Fiction of Ann Petry, Alice Childress, [End Page 113] and Gloria Naylor." CLA Journal 46 (2003): 457-77. Chopin, Kate See Elz on Cather. Dyer, Joyce. "Reading The Awakening with Toni Morrison." Southern Literary Journal 35.1 (2002): 138-54. Maguire, Roberta S. "Kate Chopin and Anna Julia Cooper: Critiquing Kentucky and the South." Southern Literary Journal 35.1 (2002): 123-137. Rich, Charlotte. "Reconsidering The Awakening: The Literary Sisterhood of Kate Chopin and George Egerton." Southern Quarterly 41.3 (2003): 121-36. Cooper, Anna Julia See Maguire on Chopin. Craigin, Elisabeth Yarbrough, Dona. "A Queer Form of Trauma: Lesbian Epistolarity in Either is Love." American Literature 75 (2003): 367-93. Davis, Rebecca Harding Lasseter, Janice Milner. "From the Archives: The Censored and Uncensored Literary Lives of Life in the Iron-Mills." Legacy 20 (2003): 175-90. Silver, Andrew. "'Unnatural Unions': Picturesque Travel, Sexual Politics, and Working-Class Representation in 'A Night Under Ground' and 'Life in the Iron-Mills.'" Legacy 20 (2003): 94-117. De Cleyre, Voltairine DeLamotte, Eugenia. "Refashioning the Mind: The Revolutionary Rhetoric of Voltairine de Cleyre." Legacy 20 (2003): 153-74. Dickinson, Emily Clarke, Graham, ed. Emily Dickinson: Critical Assessments. 4 vols. Robertsbridge, Sussex, UK: Helm Information Ltd., 2003. 3016 pp. $600.00. Doolittle, Hilda [h. D.] Morris, Adalaide. How to Live/ What to Do: H.D.'s Cultural Poetics. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003. 296 pp. $34.95. Eaton, Edith Maude [sui Sin Far] Song, Min Hyoung. "Sentimentalism and Sui Sin Far." Legacy 20 (2003): 134-52. Fauset, Jessie Jones, Sharon L. Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West. Westport: Praeger, 2002. 159 pp. $62.95. Foote, Mary Hallock Smith, Christine Hull. Reading A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote. Boise: Boise State UP, 2002. 52 pp. $5.95 paper. Fuller, Margaret Belasco, Susan. "'The animating influences of discord': Margaret Fuller in 1844." Legacy 20 (2003): 76-93. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Knight, Denise D., and Cynthia J. Davis, eds. Approaches to Teaching Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper...