Back to Search
Start Over
On Not Naming I: Onomastic Absence in Cather's My Ántonia (Or, The Name Démeublé).
- Source :
- Latch: A Journal for the Study of the Literary Artifacts in Theory, Culture or History; 2009, Vol. 2, p54-81, 28p
- Publication Year :
- 2009
-
Abstract
- There is a prevalent critical tendency to name My Ántonia's unnamed introductory narrator (in either its original or its revised incarnation) Willa Cather, "Willa Cather," or lesbian sexuality; "On Not Naming I" treats the impetus to identify and nominate the narrator as a catachrestic attempt to impose understanding on what remains a beguiling gap. I narrates the story of the conception, generation, and dissemination-via I as its mediating agent-of Jim's memoir, witnessing a history from which I is absent and that Jim describes as "incommunicable." The unnamed, unclaimed, equivocal I embodies a Catherian aesthetics compellingly rife with contradiction, a Catherian history legibly lined with loss and indirection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 19479441
- Volume :
- 2
- Database :
- Supplemental Index
- Journal :
- Latch: A Journal for the Study of the Literary Artifacts in Theory, Culture or History
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 50375722