On Not Naming I: Onomastic Absence in Cather's My Ántonia (Or, The Name Démeublé).

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]