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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Carlin, Deborah. "Reading Willa Cather: Problems and Poetics in the Late Fiction," Harvard University, June 1987.
This work is a reconsideration, through a series of close readings, of the post-1925 fiction critically neglected in Cather’s canon. I argue that Cather’s novels question the process of reading in the very act of shaping and eliciting interpretation. This textual ambivalence in the late novels centers on the disruptive power of the female protagonists who confound our expectations about how certain kinds of texts—the historical or pioneer novel, the novel of awakening, the bildungs- or kunstleroman—ought to be read. In each of these late fictions,the female protagonists are suppressed and contained at the end of the narrative in order to achieve some kind of fictional closure within a story frame. Because the texts cannot accommodate these “heroines” within the story they want to tell, we, as readers, are forced to confront a story different from the one we have initially anticipated. Rather than read Cather’s late works as narrative failures because of such a textual split, I argue that this fiction deserves to be reread and recognized as radical experimentation with textual self-consciousness and with the limits and conventions of narrative.
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