Willa Cather, My Antonia

Frame narrative

Orphaned boy from Virginia, Jim Burden, telling story of a family of Bohemian immigrants, the elder daughter, Antonia Shimerda

Questions:

1. Duvall says, in his defense of the inclusion of works termed as regionalism under the umbrella of literary modernism, “If, however, we take literary modernism as all imaginative writing that responds to the intense forces of modernization that occur from the 1890s to the eve of World War II, then we might speak of a broader range of writers, often those whose regionalism is associated with realism and naturalism, who contribute to an understanding of modernism” (243). How does My Ántonia “[respond] to the intense forces of modernization”?

2. Duvall goes on to say “Quite, simply minority and women writers did not need a world war in order to feel alienated” (243). And Walsh argues  “. . .regionalism as a genre functions as a form of textual negotiation of difference, in which ‘region’ navigates ‘various kinds or orders of cultural difference’ that exist inside and outside of itself” (309). In what ways does My Ántonia become a “textual negotiation” of cultural difference? What negotiations does the text privilege?

3. Some of the other modernist works we’ve read self-consciously announce an abrupt break from the past. My Ántonia is narrated through Jim Burden’s complex nostalgia for the past and his nostalgia is one that is very much connected to place and landscape. How do we reconcile this nostalgia with our notions of modernity?

Not regional, but international because of immigrant experience.

Antonia and Jim arrive at the same time, are twinned

Why Jim’s tale via Antonia

Antonia forms and shapes him

Cather sets her up to be the myth, but isn’t a myth, the novel is engaging with a character full person

Nick Carraway — mythic figure of Gatsby, but only seen through Nick’s eyes

Jim’s wife—says to astonish her friends, “modern woman,” suffrage, picketing for workers, etc.

Pushed against A-G new York

"Big Western dreams” Romanticism

Romance is often brutalized in Modernist works but put out right here

The life she ends up with is a very pragmatic life

Agency, self-determination

“lyrical I” relationship to nature, notions of freedom (blake and shelly)

certain kinds of ideals, not eschewed here

Responding to forces of modernization (agriculture?)

Antonia—not conventionally female, what about her as a key character in the work?

Forces of modernization?

What work does Nebraska do as a region in the book?

“Making it new” — characters “don’t have a history"

Treated as this meeting place where people meet others that they don’t understand yet but try to represent them in their minds

imagination engages with the land

the pumpkin passage— engagement with land that doesn’t stress difference

blame or suffering in landscape

Artist figure, leaves country, and leaves his creative life-force, dies

Massey, For Space—The interactions bw our idea of space and localized place, how place and space interact

it’s like a trajectory, layered feeling of history

invested with every bit of time

reaches out to the larger areas and spaces

deep layering

Jim doesn’t think about the way the land is owned and parceled, that is informing the way they’re using that space

Island—Langston Hughes Island / Harlem

Mr S had no place, now has a place at cross-roads

Cather’s pointing to a history in the land—native american, squaw creek, etc.

Aware of communist/socialist vs. self-determination