248 pages

English

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Willa Cather and Others , livre ebook

Duke University Press - Goldberg Jonathan Goldberg

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248 pages

English

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After many years as one of the premier scholars of English Renaissance literature, Jonathan Goldberg turns his attention to the work of American novelist Willa Cather. With a focus on Cather's artistic principle of "the thing not named," Willa Cather and Others illuminates the contradictions and complexities inherent in notions of identity and shows how her fiction transforms the very categories-regarding gender, sexuality, race, and class-around which most recent Cather scholarship has focused.The "others" referred to in the title are women, for the most part Cather's contemporaries, whose artistic projects allow for points of comparison with Cather. They include the Wagnerian diva Olive Fremstad, renowned for her category-defying voice; Blair Niles, an ethnographer and novelist of jazz-age Harlem and the prisons of New Guinea; Laura Gilpin, photographer of the American Southwest; and Pat Barker, whose Regeneration trilogy places World War I writers-and questions of sexuality and gender-at its center. In the process of studying these women and their work, Goldberg forms innovative new insights into a wide range of Cather's celebrated works, from O Pioneers! and My Antonia to her later books The Song of the Lark, One of Ours, The Professor's House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Sapphira and the Slave Girl.By applying his unique talent to the study of Cather's literary genius, Jonathan Goldberg makes a significant and new contribution to the study of American literature and queer studies.

Sujets

USA

Inglés estadounidense

American English

États-Unis

Informations

Publié par	Duke University Press
Date de parution	13 février 2001
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780822380320
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1348€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Willa Cather and Others

Edited by Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg,

Michael Moon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Jonathan Goldberg

illa ather and thers

Duke University Press Durham & London

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper 

Typeset in Bembo by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data appear on the last printed page of

this book.

for Sharon Cameron

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Other Names

Cather Diva

War Requiems

Strange Brothers

Notes

Bibliography

Index

xvii















Preface

I ﬁrst read Willa Cather when I was in high school. I can no longer remember which novel we were assigned—it must have beenO Pioneers!orMy Ántonia—but I can still recall what it felt like to be reading Cather then. Once I had read the assigned novel I went on to others—among them, I am certain,The Professor’s House, the novel that prompted the ﬁrst essays I wrote on the way to this book. Back then, I didn’t know Cather’s well-known pronounce-ment in ‘‘The Novel Démeublé’’ about ‘‘the thing not named,’’ but it was just that quality in Cather’s writing that spoke to me:

Whatever is felt upon the page without being speciﬁcally named there—that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as 1 well as to poetry itself.

I found the writing intense, atmospheric, heavy with something that was not said which I nonetheless recognized. I couldn’t tell what it was, aslant the calm surface of narration, that I heard. But whatever it was sounded along the wavelengths of a silence that I found irresistible. It was as if, somehow, the novels were written in a language which I could not myself articulate and yet in which I found myself articulated. Not, I should add, that I knew what they said, or what part of me they found; or, rather, I knew somehow that my own incipient, incoherent sexuality was being addressed, but couldn’t tell how the novels I was reading spoke so uncannily, couldn’t see what it was in the novels that made the connection. My experience then was like the one I have now, writing these sen-tences only to discover that they come fromThe Song of the Lark, the scene when its heroine, Thea Kronborg, is being told about ‘‘something in the inside from the beginning’’ which ‘‘she did not altogether understand . . . and yet, in a way she knew. She knew, of 2 course, that there was something in her that was diﬀerent.’’ I ﬁnd myself now as then similarly rapt by ‘‘something’’; indeed, I