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International audience; As a form of homage to her cousin killed in action, Willa Cather wrote an ambiguous novel, in which the need to glorify WWI soldiers is mingled with a disenchanted depiction of the United States. At the end of the novel, the lofty ideals that permeated the American nation during the conflict do not seem to have put an end to the consumerism that was already rampant before the war. In her attempt to resuscitate an idealism that seemed to have deserted the modern world, Cather was accused of sentimentalism by the literati of the time as well as many critics of the following decades, despite the book’s considerable popular success. Some critics, however, later pointed out that the many ironies of the narrative should dissuade the reader from hastily equating the author’s perspective with that of Claude, the protagonist. By looking at the many echoes that Joan of Arc’s story finds in the novel, I shall argue that her story symbolizes both the ideal and its loss, the former now irrevocably confined to a legendary past. We shall see in particular how the voices that Claude encounters in Nebraska serve to designate France as a far-off land that could accommodate all of his ideals, and how the voices that he eventually hears in France actually belie his idealized vision.

La journée d’étude « The Western Legacy: Hollywood Westerns and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia » s’est déroulée le 16 décembre 2017. Elle a été organisée par Marianne Kac-Vergne, maître de conférences en civilisation américaine et cinéma, et Frédérique Spill, maître de conférences HDR en littérature américaine, à l’Université de Picardie Jules Verne, avec le soutien du laboratoire de recherche CORPUS (Conflits, Représentations et Dialogues dans l’Univers Anglo-Saxon). Les organisatrices remercien...

This dissertation examines the relationship between literature and agriculture in the long twentieth century, focusing on scenes of agricultural education that teach at once a practical lesson about cultivating the land and broader lessons about how to develop a modern society. It argue that the dramatic changes wrought by rural industrialization prompted novelists to write “modern georgics,” narrative revisions of Vergil’s Georgics that imagine the effects of innovation on traditional modes of rural labor. Modernist scholars tend to overlook farmers as peripheral to the project of literary innovation, but georgic novels represent characters facing distinctly modern questions made uniquely vivid by the material urgency of farming life: how to move toward gender and racial equality, how to use industrial technologies, how to manage human impact on the environment. Thomas Hardy, Willa Cather, and Leslie Marmon Silko all feature nontraditional farmers as protagonists to show how social realities were evolving and to foreground the eclectic education required for farmers whose backgrounds prevented them from learning by simple osmosis. Hardy creates female farmers who change their own narratives from the pastorals that their suitors would prefer to georgic sagas of learning and labor. Cather’s farmers, also women, defy social norms to build their own agricultural education from self-curated selections of traditional, scientific, and environmentalist advice. Silko sends her Native farmers around the world and back to their ancestral lands; their travels teach them that farming can be at once old-fashioned and radically modern, instinctual and scientific, local and global. This dissertation offers a sustained examination of the way novelists invoke georgic didacticism and the language of farming to engage central issues of the twentieth century: gender politics, nativity and immigration, and ecological sustainability.

Exploring the vast expanses of the American wilderness in her fiction, Willa Cather had to find a new mode of nature-writing. Facing the threat of annihilation of discourse and "erasure of personality" in the vastness of the land, the author skilfully adjusts her language to the surface of the landscape. In The Song of the Lark (1915) and The Professor’s House (1925), Cather evokes the hostile yet mesmerizing canyons and mesas of the American Southwest. In order to face the alienating immensity of the landscape, Cather draws on the mediating power of material things and objects harboured in the cliff-dwellings. The radiating presence of sculpted jars, instruments and jewels set in the recesses of the rock reveals the possibility of a gentle insertion of man’s hand in nature. The relics of tools and pottery moulded in the earth or carved in stone by ancient potters become metascriptural emblems. Like a sculptor chiselling marble, the author fashions the raw material of language in order to create a simple and concrete prose linking the literariness of discourse and the literalness of the world. Cather’s crafted writing engages in the physical world. If material things pave the way to a gentle taming of the wilderness, the objects modelled by cliff-dwellers epitomize the homology between the writer’s and the potter’s gestures. Altering her signifiers by referring to natural substances, such as clay, sand, gems and metals, Cather succeeds in creating a harmonious and respectful dialogue between her writing and the surrounding world

National audience; Willa Cather started writing My Ántonia at the end of 1916, about a year after the publication of The Song of the Lark, a novel about a Colorado girl of Swedish descent who becomes the leading Wagnerian soprano of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. The Song of the Lark follows the typical progression of the Bildungsroman: Thea Kronborg, the heroine, embarks on a journey toward fame in which characters and events are all subordinated to the development of the plot. For instance, the death of Thea’s friend Ray Kennedy allows her to study music in Chicago (thanks to the money from his life insurance) and thus finds a structural justification in the story. In My Ántonia, however, Cather’s ambition was to write a novel that was not based on plot but on “the other side of the rug, the pattern that is not supposed to count in a story.” The result is a story that “hasn’t any form” in which characters, events and embedded narratives owe their inclusion in the book to their emotional charge (for instance, the story of Pavel and Peter in bk. 1 ch. 8) and, more implicitly—on the level of the author rather than the narrator,—their capacity to conjure up the figures of a bygone era (a case in point is the character of Tiny Soderball, who corresponds to the type of the bold businesswoman who makes a fortune in the Gold Rush). The unity of the novel is guaranteed by its tone—the elegy—and its controlling theme—the pastoral. If this description is accurate one character at least does not seem to fit in My Ántonia: Marek, the Shimerda son with an intellectual and physical disability, is neither a character whom Jim admires (like Ántonia or Mrs. Harling) nor one whom he hates (like Wick Cutter). Therefore, he does not stir intense emotions in him which could justify his presence in the narrative. Rather, Jim’s feelings are ambiguous toward Marek and the way the “crazy boy” systematically appears in paragraphs that deal with something or someone else could make his presence go almost unnoticed. Marek does not fit in the idealized world of the “pastoral of innocence” that My Ántonia is supposed to be. Nonetheless, Jim chooses to include Marek and his presence in the narrative needs to be accounted for. I will argue that this presence can best be understood by comparing and contrasting Marek with the other disabled character of the story, the pianist Blind d’Arnault. To solve the contradiction between Cather’s racist depiction of d’Arnault and her simultaneous praise for his musical talent, Elizabeth Ammons proposes that Cather’s racism serves to cover her own indebtedness to African-American music. My argument will be somewhat different as I will consider that there is no contradiction here, since Blind d’Arnault and Marek Shimerda are used to figure the primitive forces at work on the fringes of the pastoral retreat, their description in subhuman terms being a corollary to their function in the novel. Incidentally, my analysis will lead me to examine in what way Jim and Cather differ or agree, reopening the debate about Jim’s reliability.

Procedo neste ensaio a uma leitura comparada de dois romances de guerra do modernismo americano: One of Ours, de Willa Cather, e The Unvanquished, de William Faulkner. A análise debruça-se sobre a construção social do sexo e a subversão de papéis sexuais no contexto instável e destruidor do conflito militar. Focando sobretudo duas personagens, Claude Wheeler and Drusilla Hawk, pretendo analisar a guerra como o espaço escolhido pelos dois autores para testar a (in)conformidade sexual dos jovens, bem como a sua capacidade para desafiar as convenções sociais e religiosas. Uma vez que ambos se alistam voluntariamente, a guerra é apresentada tanto como lugar de destruição social como de construção individual. Interessa-me ainda discutir as implicações teóricas do facto de cada um dos autores ter escolhido, para a sua narrativa de ficção, jovens soldados de sexo oposto ao seu. This is a comparative reading of two war novels: One of Ours, by Willa Cather, and The Unvanquished, by William Faulkner. The comparison addresses gender construction and gender subversion in the socially disruptive context of military conflict. Focusing mainly on two characters, Claude Wheeler and Drusilla Hawk, I intend to investigate the war in the novels as a space chosen by both authors to test out the young characters’ gender (in-)conformity and the extent of their ability to challenge social and religious convention. Since both join the army voluntarily, the war appears as a site for social destruction as much as for individual construction. I am interested in the fact that both writers chose a soldier-figure of the opposite sex and will be discussing the reasons for such options and possible theoretical implications. Dans cet essai, je procède par une lecture comparée de deux romans de guerre du modernisme américain: One of Ours, de Willa Cather, et The Unvanquished, de William Faukner. L’analyse se penche sur la construction sociale du sexe et la subversion des rôles sexuels dans le contexte instable et destructeur du conflit militaire. Mettant en relief surtout deux personnages, Claude Wheeler et Drusilla Hawk, je tente d’analyser la guerre comme l’espace choisi par les eux auteurs pour examiner l’(in)conformité sexuelle des jeunes, ainsi que leur capacité à défier les conventions sociales et religieuses. Une fois que tous les deux s’inscrivent à l’armée, volontairement, la guerre est présentée aussi bien comme lieu de destruction sociale que de construction individuelle. Je porte en outre la discussion sur les implications théoriques du fait que les auteurs ont choisi, pour leur narration fictionnelle, de jeunes soldats de sexe opposé par rapport à eux-mêmes.

In Willa Cather’s most important novel, My Ántonia, the killing of a rattlesnake marks the coming of age of the young man Jimmy. Before this incident, he had been regarded as a mere boy by Ántonia, but afterwards, she perceived him with respect as a young man. In the snake-killing scene, the poison was described as “a thread of green liquid,” although in actuality, rattlesnake venom is whitish yellow, not green. The idea that snake venom is green is well rooted in American folk stories about snakes. This article discusses snake loreinvolving the green motif, and the symbolic use of green in folklore and literature. Cather’s use of green venom in the young man’s initiation rite is particularly appropriate not only because it fits into the folklore vernacular of the people butalso because as a symbol it carries multiple conflicting yet unified meanings.

In most of her novels, Willa Cather situates her fiction within the vast, untrodden expanses of the American West. However, as Cather temporarily decided to turn away from the natural landscapes of the West in order to approach the city, she had to find a new mode of writing. Indeed, if the novel’s format fits the ever-stretching horizontality of the wilderness, the condensed space of the short story seems to be harmoniously adjusted to the architectured yet protean texture of the city. By focusing on two short stories devoted to the representation of New York at the turn of the twentieth century—"Coming, Aphrodite!" and "The Diamond Mine"—, this analysis aims at showing that in her short stories in particular, Cather invents a genuine poetics of urban concreteness. She establishes a subtle compromise between realist and modernist approaches. Indeed, avoiding any panoramic view of the setting, Cather succeeds in conveying an elusive and fragmentary evocation of New York City. In order to create an intimate urban cartography, Cather emphasizes a selection of topographic and architectural landmarks emerging in the blur of the city. Now, if material things simultaneously delineate and fashion the outlines of the city, they also contribute to the modelling of the protagonists’ bodies. Elaborating an analogy between the partially veiled and yet carnal silhouettes of the heroines and the hazy yet concrete contours of the city, Cather’s writing moves from a pictorial to a sculptural dimension. Sensitive to the ever-renewed colours, lights, sounds and shapes of the city, Willa Cather’s literary language is permeated by the intensity of the urban experience, which ultimately paves the way for a poetic encounter between the text and the tangible world of the city.

Exploring the vast expanses of the American wilderness in her fiction, Willa Cather had to find a new mode of nature-writing. Facing the threat of annihilation of discourse and "erasure of personality" in the vastness of the land, the author skilfully adjusts her language to the surface of the landscape. In The Song of the Lark (1915) and The Professor’s House (1925), Cather evokes the hostile yet mesmerizing canyons and mesas of the American Southwest. In order to face the alienating immensity of the landscape, Cather draws on the mediating power of material things and objects harboured in the cliff-dwellings. The radiating presence of sculpted jars, instruments and jewels set in the recesses of the rock reveals the possibility of a gentle insertion of man’s hand in nature. The relics of tools and pottery moulded in the earth or carved in stone by ancient potters become metascriptural emblems. Like a sculptor chiselling marble, the author fashions the raw material of language in order to create a simple and concrete prose linking the literariness of discourse and the literalness of the world. Cather’s crafted writing engages in the physical world. If material things pave the way to a gentle taming of the wilderness, the objects modelled by cliff-dwellers epitomize the homology between the writer’s and the potter’s gestures. Altering her signifiers by referring to natural substances, such as clay, sand, gems and metals, Cather succeeds in creating a harmonious and respectful dialogue between her writing and the surrounding world

Cet article explore les enjeux ideologiques et esthetiques de la representation de la montagne dans trois romans de Willa Cather : The Song of the Lark, The Professor’s House et Death Comes for the Archbishop. L’espace des mesas et canyons du Sud-Ouest americain y semble constamment envisage comme un espace proto-museal, un conservatoire des traces de societes indiennes disparues dont il s’agit, pour l’ecrivain, de trouver un equivalent formel dans la structure et les techniques descriptives de son propre texte

“‘Singled Out for Loss’: Narrating Lost American Origins, 1925-1991” argues that narratives of American national origin, far from being static, singular historical experiences, reflect a process of constant and continuing revision. Twentieth century authors map transnational foundations of America through the construction of narratives formally and thematically centered on loss. These narratives highlight the unstable nature of national origin itself, and offer a deep ambivalence about both national identity and loss itself. Even in the act of restoring forgotten histories of origin that tie America to elsewhere materially, narratively, and culturally, the texts maintain an aesthetic of loss in an attempt to resist reinscribing the power dynamics of linear history and American myth that they hope to destabilize. William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men (1980), Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925), and Agha Shahid Ali’s A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991) plot a diverse experience of American spaces, each text restoring violent and troubling histories to the origins of America. Whether in the novel, memoir, or through poetry, narrating lost histories undermines the stability of national identity by questioning the singularity of founding America and the authenticity of claims for ancestry. The material world—space, landscape, artifact, architecture—serves a significant role in restoring lost histories in the texts, but the texts also demonstrate the ways in which the material world can be used either in service of undermining naturalized identity categories, or in fact, in solidifying those categories. Throughout the texts, America is “Singled Out for Loss,” a line from Ali’s poem “Beyond the Ash Rains”; the title suggests the ways that losses—cultural, material, imaginary, bodily—have been a necessary aspect of founding America, and are marked as such throughout the texts. However, the title also indicates the way that by restoring lost and troubling histories of origin, the idea of the American nation remains in many ways exceptional, “singled out” in part through these connected histories of loss at its foundation. I argue that despite suggesting alternative sites of American origin, ranging from ancient to recent experiences in Asia, the Caribbean, and the Americas, the texts resist flattening multicultural inclusion of those new stories of origin in part by the focus on history as a narrative, performative process—an often ambivalent one that resists a singular experience. As the texts critique the narrative and material complexity of founding the nation, I contend that they offer a model of how to leave space for “lost” violent or troubled origins without reverting to simplified narratives of American exceptionalism, achieved in part through the focus on loss as a central feature of national origin.

International audience; With Lucy Gayheart Willa Cather returned to the genre of the Künstlerroman she had first explored in The Song of the Lark. Interestingly, while there was one artist in the 1915 novel, there are two in Lucy Gayheart and both meet a tragic death, giving this coming-of-age story a markedly different resonance. Whereas The Song of the Lark depicted Thea Kronborg’s ascent to stardom, Lucy Gayheart tells the story of a moderately ambitious piano student who is cut off in her prime before she can prove her worth. In this later novel, Cather seems to display the same aesthetic ideals as in her early works. And yet, as a brief look at the synopsis of both novels quickly shows, it would be quite hasty to regard Lucy Gayheart as a mere rewriting of The Song of the Lark. Although many expressions and turns of phrase regarding music are very reminiscent of Cather’s previous novels and stories, it is hard to ignore the much gloomier atmosphere that pervades the novel, which according to Susan Rosowski even carries Gothic undertones (219-231). One other major difference between the two novels is the perspective from which art is described in each : whereas The Song of the Lark takes us to the heart of the creative process by showing us how someone becomes a great artist, in Lucy Gayheart the protagonist most of the time is not the object of study. On the contrary, she is in the position of the spectator who looks up to the great artist (Clement Sebastian but also the soprano the Gayhearts admire in a performance of The Bohemian Girl in Haverford [bk. 2, ch. 7]) and tries to understand where his or her mysterious power comes from. This change of perspective is not merely a ploy to make yet another novel about a subject that Cather had already dealt with many times in her fiction. In the twenty years that separate the two novels I would argue that Cather’s views on life and the arts have shifted from optimism to skepticism. At the beginning of her writing career, when she was still mostly a journalist, she stated that the hardest thing for an artist was to “express” his or her ideas and perceptions. However “perilous” that “voyage” from the brain to the instrument of one’s art, she did not doubt that a few managed to journey safely to “the truth.” Nineteen years later, the virtual apotheosis of Thea as Sieglinde seems to be proof that Cather still maintained a rather optimistic view of the powers of the artist. However, The Song of the Lark is probably her most teleological piece of fiction and following novels such as The Professor’s House or Death Comes for the Archbishop show much more circumspection toward the possibility of delineating any straightforward voyage, be it in life or in art. At sixty one Cather offers a much more problematic account of artistic success. Describing Lucy Gayheart as “Cather’s most fashionable text in its self-deconstruction” (260, note 5), Blanche Gelfant shows how Cather’s novel constantly betrays her anxieties regarding the power of words and her own ability to make the reader feel what is not directly there on the page. Following a similar line of argument, I will examine how she very subtly conveys her views on the art of performance, in a way that confirms how much of a master in concision she was at the end of her career, while letting a persistent skepticism creep into any statement the narrator or the characters seem to make, revealing her gnawing doubts about the meaning and purpose of any artistic endeavor. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that the musical scenes in Lucy Gayheart—and indeed the whole novel—need to be approached as original statements in their own right rather than mere rewritings of previous scenes from Cather’s fiction.

The primary texts for this essay are My Antonia and O Pioneers!. Using My Antonia I establish the existence of an energetic essence that quickens the land and various characters of these novels. The influence of this wild energy is manifest mainly through color and movement. I focus specifically on Antonia and Blind d'Arnault who instinctively connect with this energy and react to it in a way that brings them feelings of happiness and wholeness. Using O Pioneers! I further define the term "energy" by examining it as a natural force that activates and inspires art. Focusing mainly on Alexandra Bergson, I discuss in detail the balanced artistic relationship some characters establish with the energy as they temper its spontaneity with control and unite instinct with will. Their efforts result in vitalized art that expands the energy and reveals its renewing and life-sustaining capabilities. All the objects and individuals who share in the embodiment of this energy are part of its interminable influence. As a foundation for theme and character, this force of energy is an integral part of Cather's celebrated works.

National audience

This dissertation explores the reoccurrence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein within twentieth-century American novels. While the inaccurate 1931 film version by James Whale remains the best known adaptation of Frankenstein, I argue that Willa Cather, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Chuck Palahniuk return to Shelley’s 1818 novel to critique racist and misogynistic responses to anxieties about gender and racial power in the age of industrial consumer culture. In doing so, I extend existing scholarship on the American Gothic to demonstrate that The Professor’s House, Invisible Man, Beloved, and Fight Club represent a specifically Shelleyan Gothic tradition in twentieth-century American literature. My project draws upon influential feminist and postcolonial readings of Frankenstein and on the theoretical work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and later critics who have developed her theory to show how the twentieth-century novels echo themes and motifs from Shelley’s novel to critique the destructive effects of male homosociality. Each novel contains a protagonist that resembles Victor Frankenstein and responds to historically specific anxieties about gender, race, and industrial technoscience by creating a doppelgänger who enables participation in a homosocial bond that is initially empowering but proves destructive to women, racial minorities, and eventually the creature and creator figures themselves. My reading reveals unexpected similarities between Cather’s The Professor’s House and Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Cather’s novel appears to glorify Tom Outland as the ideal masculine hero but ultimately reveals him to be a monstrous doppelgänger who acts out the Professor’s oppressive impulses; similarly, Fight Club seems to romanticize the male violence instigated by the doppelgänger figure Tyler Durden but actually echoes Shelley’s critique of male homosociality as monstrous. My reading also reveals previously overlooked similarities between Invisible Man and Beloved, both of which feature a black protagonist who surprisingly resembles Victor Frankenstein by creating a doppelgänger to challenge his or her disempowerment by the structures of white male homosociality but end up emulating the destructive homosocial structures they critique. My dissertation shows how all of these writers share Shelley’s critique yet move beyond it by offering alternatives to the destructive cycle of violence, embodied in each case by a female figure who resists or reclaims the position of the abject other in the homosocial triangle.

Literature is a source that enriches students’ language ability on every level and short stories are a form that is suitable for adolescent students. To young people, memories from childhood are still close and vivid. To most these memories are mixed; among games and adventures there are both happiness and disappointments, both childhood friendships and betrayals. It is a topic everyone can talk about and many discussions can be developed from it. In addition, the short story is a genre that can be easily applied to the classroom because of its length. There is no great risk that the students will not remember the content of the story after reading. For students that are not pursuing further academic life, or low-performing students, short stories are definitely a better choice than novels. This essay sets out to compare three of Willa Cather’s short stories: “The Way of the World”, “The Enchanted Bluff” and “The Treasure of Far Island”. All three stories show us a childhood world as experienced by a group of children centered round a leader. These childhood worlds are portrayed from an adult perspective, with much beauty and nostalgia, giving a sense of the innocence, excitement and magic of a childhood paradise. The essay argues that it is through the power of children’s imagination that their paradise is created and that sooner or later paradise is lost. However, in the last of the three stories, the childhood paradise is regained in adulthood through the artistic imagination.

Willa Cather (1873-1947) is nowadays regarded as one of the most important U.S. writers, and the volume of critical works, articles and dissertations devoted to her as a person and an artist is immense. One of the problematic relationship has always been, as can be seen from a number of critical essays and books, between Cather and U.S. feminists. The feminists would have liked to include Cather, as an feminist writer, into their group of the first-rate, woman-authored "female canon", however, such intent brought about an important question. Is it possible to regard Willa Cather as a feminist, considering her attacks on other women-writers, and her negative attitude towards the organized women's rights movement? This work's objective is to explore the background of Cather and organized women's rights movement's bizarre relationship, and answer the question above. To find out if Cather's work with its strong heroines empowered or weakened women in general, her novels and stories, rather then facts and assumption about her personal life, are used. The relevant parts of the plots from Cather's fiction are put into the historical perspective of the contemporary U.S. laws, showing that although Cather created exceptional woman characters, she let them deal with the same conditions and problems other...

Article, 紀要. 29, 1993, p.39-44