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... Journal of Teaching Writing Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis EDITOR Kim Brian Lovejoy IUPUI REVIEWS EDITOR Joseph Janangelo Loyola University of Chicago EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Julia Spratt IUPUI EDITORIAL BOARD Brandie L. Bohney Bowling Green State University Rebecca Moore Howard Syracuse University Kelly Bradbury Colorado State University Austin Dorrell Jackson Brown University Kathleen J. Cassity Western Oregon University William J. Macauley, Jr. The University of Nevada, Reno Kathleen Crosby University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Mary Nicolini Penn High School Peter Elbow University of Massachusetts, Amherst Staci Perryman-Clark Western Michigan University Moe Folk Kutztown University Elaine Richardson The Ohio State University Kay Halasek The Ohio State University Deborah Rossen-Knill University of Rochester Alice S. Horning Oakland University Katherine Sohn Pikeville College JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 1 i 1/22/20 3:10 PM  2019 (34.2) Indiana Teachers of Writing ISSN 07351259 ii 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 2 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM CONTENTS Articles COACHING THE WRITING VOICE OF THE NON-READER: TEACHING LITERARY ANALYSIS THROUGH A STUDENTS LIFE ______________________________________ _1 Lisbeth Chapin AFFECTING ARGUMENT: STUDENTS LEARNING TO ARGUE AND ARGUING TO LEARN _______________________ 17 Amy D. Williams BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE: UNDERSTANDING (CRITICAL) COMPOSITION FOR THE INDIAN IMMIGRANT STUDENT ___________________________________ 41 Nidhi Rajkumar Teacher to Teacher MAKING MEANING: EFFECTIVE AND PRACTICAL REVISION INSTRUCTION _______________________________ 67 Brandie Bohney BEYOND IS THIS GOOD?: RETHINKING REVISION TO FORGE A COMMUNITY _________________________________ 71 Katie Nagrotsky PLAYING A HEALTHY REVISION PROCESS IN THE CLASSROOM ___ 76 Anna Daley JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 3 iii 1/22/20 3:10 PM SHOW THEM HOW: PEER REVIEW AS PART OF PROCESS _______ 82 Paula Uriarte BLACKOUT REVISION: A STRATEGY FOR PLAYFUL DE/CONSTRUCTION OF STUDENT DRAFTS ____________________________ 87 Mark Latta Reviews Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope: Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms. Cheryl L. Glenn ___ 91 Reviewed by Wendy Piper Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles. Harry Denny, Robert Mundy, Liliana M. Naydan, Richard Svre, and Anna Sicari ____________________ 97 Reviewed by Eliana Schonberg ABOUT THE AUTHORS ________________________ 105 ANNOUNCEMENTS ___________________________ 109 iv 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 4 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM COACHING THE WRITING VOICE OF THE NON-READER: TEACHING LITERARY ANALYSIS THROUGH A STUDENTS LIFE Lisbeth Chapin In many introductory literature courses on college campuses, instructors encounter students who willingly self-identify as nonreaders; these are often the same students who are not only uninterested in reading literature but also assume they have very little to say about it, who are fairly certain their opinions about it are of no interest to their instructor, and who often find no relevance in studying literature or contributing to classroom discussions about it. As Gerald Graff observes, professors can tacitly assume that everyone knows the justification for the [literary] analysis, a situation that can widen the gap between students who eagerly talk the talk of literary analysis and students who remain silent, bored, and alienated (1). At small universities such as ours that emphasize career preparationmost of our students are majoring in the health care fieldsnon-readers can be the most common student in the classroom, taking the course as an elective that fits their schedule, with little motivation in reading literature and less in analyzing it or understanding why others do. A semester-long class of such students can seem interminable, when previously successful classroom strategies fall flat. Even approaching only a six-week summer course, The Short Story, I anticipated a possible lack of interest and engagement from the students who would arrive in my classroom and considered that I would be grading the kind of writing that reflects such reading apathy. It was time to shift strategies again. After twenty nine years of teaching literature and writing, I know that one effective teaching strategy is to design an assignment JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 5 VOLUME 34.2 1/22/20 3:10 PM that students do not expect, where neither the instructor nor the student can anticipate what may follow. The goal is to make the professor and the students feel invested, activated, and engaged together in the classroom and its discoveries; consequently, I designed assignments that made learning the elements of literary analysis personal, as if the students own lives were short stories. This essay explains the process by which a literature course can elicit good prose writing from students who write about their own lives first and literary analysis second, culminating with their assignments in a writing portfolio. The final literary analysis essay and self-assessment piece incorporate the students reflections of themselves as more aware writers and readers, and the experience of teaching with this method certainly can generate the same for the instructor. The results were gratifying beyond my expectations; in fact, it confirmed for me that when the issues in students lives connect with the academic subject and task at hand, their genuine writing voices can come through powerfully, and that experience can vindicate the instruction of writing, as well as transform the students conception of deep learning through literature. Student Expectations and Engagement In a typical introductory literature course like this one, assignments usually focus on analyzing literature to find meaning in the experience of a text, a skill that is transferable to analyzing other complex works of art and expression. However, knowing that I might be walking into an assemblage of reluctant readers and writers, I decided to shift my focus from analytical writing assignments on the short stories to analytical description and definition pieces about the literary elements of the students own lives first: setting, symbolism, character, and dialogue. These terms we repeat so blithely can rest like stones under the stream of our students thoughts about literature overheard from teachers for yearswith little understanding of their impact within a story, poem, or play. Surprisingly, I discovered that if students read short stories, discuss one literary element of the story in class, and then focus on that element in the short stories of their own livesa significant setting in their recent week, for 2 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 6 1/22/20 3:10 PM examplethey can become much more engaged in the momentum of the short story at hand and, more important, in the identity of themselves as writers. By writing about their own lives instead of initially about the literature itself, students can comprehend better the complexity of literature, such as which details writers choose in order to deepen the meaning and experience of a work of literature. In my class about the short story, the students became invested in writing effectively about their lives because they wanted to have a great impact on their readersthe other class members and me. In short, they became more invested writers. Compositionists such as Peter Elbow and Patricia Bizzell have long discussed both the institutional and pedagogical split between literature and composition that sees writing and reading as opposed activities, while also trying to stress the linkage between reading and writing, as Phoebe Jackson notes. In applying Elbows contention that giving more centrality to writing would enable students to see how meaning is slowly constructed, negotiated, and changed, Jackson assigns low-stakes writing exercises in her Introduction to Literature course, which require students to identify with characters and put themselves in the story, such as with Lorraine Hansberrys A Raisin in the Sun (Elbow 280; Jackson 112). Jackson reports that her goal was achieved: the writing exercise worked to destabilize students initial thoughts about the play, and they began the first step of discovering how to generate meaning about a text through writing (112). Elbow explains in a later essay that compositionists and literature people could benefit by merging their cultures: I wish the culture of literary studies gave more honor to the courage of just sitting with, attending to, or contemplating a text and adds, what do I wish people in composition could learn from the culture of literature? More honoring of style, playfulness, fun, pleasure, humor (The Cultures 543). The methods of both Elbow and Jackson develop essentially what often takes place in a class discussion about literature: students insinuate themselves into the work of literature at hand and move inside the characters and setting, discovering what it could feel like from their own perspective. Gayle Whittier COACHING THE WRITING VOICE 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 7 3 1/22/20 3:10 PM uses similar strategies in her course, Alternative Responses to Literature, in which one assignment asks students to compose thoughts about literature and space; her main aim of the course was to restore pleasure to reading and writing in a college setting through shared enthusiasm (170). These are effective ways to write about literature, but these assignments do not, in my opinion, displace students expectations enough. Students can still think that their own lives and the stories of the characters lives are completely unconnected. More recently, James Seitz argues that The Secret to a Good Writing Assignment is being less focused on simply declaring a thesis and finding supporting evidence and more focused on a way to inquire into a problem, to seek out and multiply possibilities for addressing that problem, instead of rushing to an ill-informed conclusion before [the students] even recognize the depth of the questions before them; he explains, Im suggesting we might reconsider our obsessive attachment to the thesis, to argument, in our writing assignments (52). Seitz makes a good case, and his kind of writing assignment could be quite successful especially for courses with a variety of readings, across the genres; however, it also may require more class instruction regarding strategies to approach such an assignment. Seitzs suggestion is a relevant one, and such an assignment is worth considering as a bridge between a composition course and a literature survey course. Unfortunately, for the typical non-readers in a literature course, they have no questions to pose because they see the creative piece at hand as complete and remote, requiring nothing of them; they know it will be considered good literature no matter what their input about it is, and their curiosity about it remains dormant. Elbows desire for the pedagogies of the composition and literature cultures to merge is a convergence that can benefit both, especially if the emphasis can turn first toward the student instead of the literature. My assignments in The Short Story course continue this convergence but with a distinct difference: in class we analyze the short stories in our discussion, but, aside from a response paragraph about the readings for each class meeting, the 4 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 8 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM students longer writing assignments focus first only on their own lives, not on the short story. After that, they explore a particular literary element either in a reading response or as part of the essay on the Midterm or Final Exam, culminating in a literary analysis final essay. For example, they are directed first to analyze a literary element, such as setting, from their own experience: to explain and describe a setting that is significant to them and their families. An important distinction to make is that this is no artificial exercise for which writing about their lives is merely a brief stopping point, but rather their description of this element, such as setting, can be an end in itself: to explore the impact of their true voice on their fellow classroom readers (shared in peer review workshops). In this case, the reading response on setting in the short story assignment that follows begins a parallel study of the literary elements that will comprise their portfolio: defining setting in their lives and comparing it with the setting in a short story we read. With this kind of syllabus, I have found students to be more enthused about their writing, enjoying the exercise of describing their favorite environments, symbols in their home, or the characters of friends and family members; this enthusiasm can transfer quite smoothly to their analysis of the literary readings, and my enthusiasm for reading their portfolios also increases. The Students World and the Academic Voice Besides attaining confidence about the subject, our classroom writers can thrive on assignments that bring others into their world: their families, their history, their heritage, their communities. Students in my course share sections of their portfolios with each other and explain their choice of topics and details. Kim Brian Lovejoy observes that when students write for different purposes and audiences, they learn that language need not be as rigid as they might have thought, that students learn about language as a dynamic cultural entity (85). In writing about significant matters of their daily lives, students extend the language of their intimate world into the language of the classroom and academic world. Lovejoys observation about the fluidity of language is an important one; it affirms for COACHING THE WRITING VOICE 5 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 9 1/22/20 3:10 PM students that they can communicate in effective ways already and that it is the job of writers to communicate their world to the reader who is not part of that. By language, I mean not only diction but also syntax, tone, clarity, and the choice of detailsall that generates a coherent momentum for the reader. Almost all student writers bring something of this language into their academic discourse, and we professors must be on guard not to allow the students voice to evaporate in the process of completing our assignments. Asking students to write about their lives, their issues, their college and personal environment is most successful when the intention goes beyond a gesture to inspire confidence and carries with it an intention to inspire empowerment. Empowerment is achieved when students merge their worlds with the academic world. And an empowered student is a compelling writer. Grading as an Interested Reader Again Every writing teacher knows the dreaded mental wall one faces when grading essays with predictable content, including Rebecca Gemmell, of the San Diego Area Writing Project, who identifies robot writing as the kind that students produce from years of responding to directions that ask them to analyze common literary elements. These are the kind of essays that any student can find online for a fee, the kind that any student anywhere could have written; such writing is bland and uninspired, and the students distinctive voice is nowhere within it. Consequently, Gemmell shifted tactics and asked her students to write a response to an essay about the death of poetry. In response, she got more passionate and convincing arguments from students than ever before, and she followed that with a short, reflective writing practice that required students opinions not necessarily about Macbeth himself, for example, but about the definition of a hero in todays society (64). One result was that when the students got around to writing more about the literary work at hand, they wrote thesis statements that presented a clear stance, among other improvements (67). She was much more interested in grading assignments in which the students had invested something of their experiences and opinions, rather 6 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 10 1/22/20 3:10 PM than the mechanically written essays they had previously submitted to her. In truth, the key is to involve the students on a level where their thoughts go more deeply into their lives, go beyond an intellectual exercise. I was curious to see what my students had written when sitting down to grade the first writing assignment in my course; that curiosity alone was an indication that I, too, was more engaged and ready to experience the pleasure of being a reader of their work and not only a grader. I was not disappointednor was I bored, distracted, frustrated, or mentally exhausted, all of which we can experience in grading student writing. Rather, I was drawn into the momentum of their descriptive settings and characters, touched by the details of their narratives, encouraged by the depth of their observations. In response to the assignment to write on the element of dialogue in their lives, one student shared a particularly poignant conversation she overheard between her parents in the hospital about her brother, who was dying. Her analysis of their word choice, tone, and responsiveness to one anothers comments was as thorough and insightful as any I have read by a student. Another wrote about the conversation she had with her mother upon returning to a childhood home. Writing about their lives through the focus of literary elements does not automatically make students good writers, but it does illuminate for them that the literary elements worth analyzing in a work of literature are relevant in understanding what the author is saying about being human. And grading their assignments certainly made me a more involved reader than I would have expected to be in this course. Syllabus and Writing Assignments My syllabus for The Short Story required writing assignments of five hundred words each on four topics: a significant setting in students present or past experience, a symbol important to their family, a character (real person, living or not) in their lives who has impacted them deeply, and a dialogue they found meaningful (see Appendix A). Students had to describe and analyze each element; subsequent readings responses about the short stories then explored COACHING THE WRITING VOICE 7 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 11 1/22/20 3:10 PM that element in the literature. Other graded work included midterm and final exams (quotation identification, short answer, and essay), a quiz on each short story, and an essay analyzing at least two elements of a story from the syllabus (with an academic journal article for support), incorporating also into the essay a reflection paragraph about their reason for choosing the particular author they did, as well as a self-assessment essay (300 words) reflecting on their writing in the course. The final grades ranged from an A to a C+, which is fairly typical of this class, but the enthusiasm for writing about the stories was much more robust than I have usually observed in a course taken by non-English majors to fulfill an elective. To deal with the long in-class hours (3-hour class meeting, twice a week for a summer course), I used the computer lab to keep the writing momentum moving forward, beginning with a simple writing prompt for the pieces that would make up their portfolio (see Appendix B). In short, for this literature class, I wanted to catch the students off guard, since I believe they were expecting exactly what I could have assigned and what they likely were assigned the last time they studied short stories, perhaps in high school. There are good reasons to focus on the standard elements of fiction with the literature, and we include a careful study of them in this class, but not immediately or specifically in the writing assignments. So at our second meeting, when I directed them to write about a setting that they knew well and that they could describe in rich detail to someone who had never been there, the students were surprised, but not one of them hesitated to begin. Their writing did not disappointme or them. The Students Emerging Voices In ensuing days in the computer lab, students wrote about their familys favorite vacation place, about the characters of their friends, about the dialogue between sisters. Some were more serious than others, but I found myself very much looking forward to reading what the students had written that week. Initiating new sorts of writing tasks can be the difference between engaging a student with little interest in literature or writing and one who feels fully involved; 8 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 12 1/22/20 3:10 PM I was genuinely interested in reading what they knew well, and they responded to my interest. The most compelling pieces of writing were often about topics the students had not previously thought worth writing about, involving difficult experiences. This was demonstrated by my student Shannons thoughts about writers who explored the dynamics of the family. She wrote, Having a support system that consists of family members is essential to a persons well being. In Alice Walkers short story Everyday Use, she dramatizes the negative effects on a person that result due to poor family relationships. Maggie is shown as a meek, nearly silent character who stands in the shadow of her older sister Dee. Walker illustrates how the lack of support from a family results in a person becoming withdrawn, isolated and alone. My family is very close, so when my mother fell ill, we relied on each other heavily. We were used to sitting in hospitals and listening to the beeping of monitors. We all sat around my mothers bedside calmly while other families would have been hysterical. In the span of a few months, those trips had become the norm. My mother had been severely sick for over a year and the experience put our family through trying times. We had to plan our schedules around doctors appointments and turn down invitations to spend time with family friends. We sat in waiting rooms, at doctors offices, and through consultations. We were shown models of the body as doctors and surgeons explained each new theory on what was wrong (see Appendix C for full story). When we professors declare that the universality of human experience can be found in literature, we assume that students accept that claim, but that idea is never made more relevant than when students explore challenges in their own experience through a study of the literature we teach. Significantly, I did not procrastinate in grading these pieces, since they were a continual discovery to me. Because I learned more about my students own family characters, settings, and lives, I understood them and their ways of learning more deeply. For example, what details do they notice in a natural setting? What do COACHING THE WRITING VOICE 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 13 9 1/22/20 3:10 PM they see when they walk into their living room? How do they listen to their grandmother? We translated these to their habits of reading: What descriptive passages do they think are most significant? What is the impact of certain word choices in the characters dialogue? Why do they miss certain points of the plot? How do they hear a dialogue inside their own head when reading? All of these are worthy of close study in any course that involves readers analyzing a literary text, and the more they wrote, the better my students saw the connections we were making. Each of you is living within your own series of short stories, I declared more than once and then explained that until they understood the settings, characters, plots, and dialogues in their own lives, they could not well appreciate and enjoy the stories that authors wrote. After weeks of these kinds of writing exercises and discussing both their writing and the short stories in relation to the elements of fiction, one student wrote in a final self-assessment: Through our class discussions, I discovered parts of the story and their relationship to the plot that I would have missed otherwise, and these insights helped me to see that authors put their heart and soul into their work and that the most minute details are written with a purpose and are vital to the story. She added, Our class essays helped me to find my voice as a writer. . . . I developed a clear sense of self in my writing, and have more confidence in my writing. One of the most compelling pieces she wrote was about the dialogue between her troubled brother and her father, which she overheard. Our students see and experience stories in their lives that are equally as compelling as the stories we read together in any course; our responses to their disclosure of these details can demonstrate to them that all good writing is about communicating as clearly as possible from ones own perspective, ones genuine voice. Maura Stetson underscores this in her analysis of discerning a students institutional voice versus an authentic one when she notes that [v]oice is developed through the students individually discovering and gaining confidence in what they have to say, adding that [a]uthenticity in writing cant be taught, but it can be encouraged (74). Introducing writing tasks that incorporate different aspects of students lives, aspects that can be aligned to 10 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 14 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM literary elements, inspires students confidence in their ability to communicate and define their own voice; such tasks feel more immediate to the student and more responsive to the act of writing itself. By inviting students to write about their lives as short stories, an instructor can help a non-English major or a non-reader discover abilities and methods of learning that the student has not previously considered. New methods of writing can stimulate the interest of both student and professor, and the center of that place is the best kind of writing to achieve, often that which changes the student and his reader in the process. One of my students, Chris, wrote a piece that I could not put down, entitled, Fallujah. Here is an excerpt: It is a bright moonlit night, the full moon reflecting off the slightly corroded railroad ties. The stars are brilliant when viewed northward, but to the south the lights of the city mask their beauty. A gentle breeze slightly caresses my face through the ballistic eyewear and protective gear that is unwantedly carried. There are far off sounds of mortars and RPGS (rocket-propelled grenades) echoing over the berm yet again. Another night of dogs howling, these grotesque, four legged, disease ridden, creatures that never shut the hell up. It is the beginning of a three-day mission to the soy field near the Jolan district on the outskirts of Fallujah, and the insurgents know we are coming. I hate night missions because you never know whether your next step will be your last, due to the dark. Gratefully its bright, so I wont step on anything; on the other hand, they can see me walking along that berm, the only safe place to walk on a night like this. Rocks, rocks, rocks, a never ending cascade of rocks that twist, tweak, and roll ankles, knees and hips, like that of a small dinghy in the ocean. Miles behind us, miles to go, we are half way now, over the foul smelling, murky, and almost gelatinous stream that feeds the Euphrates (see Appendix D for full story). The intensity of this piece is one possible kind of result that an instructor could expect in an initiative to write about students experiences. In such cases, the instructor can approach the method COACHING THE WRITING VOICE 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 15 11 1/22/20 3:10 PM of feedback from several perspectives. As mentioned above, I first responded to the impact of his writing on me as a reader; in our conversation after class, the student was astonished that I found his piece so fascinating. An Iraq war veteran returning to college, Chris was pursuing a Bachelor of Science degree in nursing and did not consider himself to be a writer at all. But something changed him in the process of studying short story writers alongside the stories and settings of his own life. As he wrote in his self-assessment, weeks later: As I am not a writer by any stretch of the imagination, I was a little apprehensive in the idea of taking a short story course as an elective. However, in the short time that I was in the course I came to realize that I identified with one author in particular, Ernest Hemingway. He wrote in a manner that spoke to me. He was honest and blunt. Writing is now not just a chore for school, but a gratifying hobby that has helped me heal, explore, understand, and become enlightened like no other outlet has. I am grateful for the blessing bestowed upon me to be able to put my words on paper in such a manner that can heal and inspire. As the student discovered, this experience was more than simply learning how to write effectively in college; in short, this writing experience deserves a quality of feedback from the instructor that is as genuine as the voice of the student writer, respectful of his testimonial. As with all my students, I wanted Chris to understand that narrative writing, especially in the writing of a memoir, as one psychologist articulates, can help individuals move forward and become transformed and empowered during and after the writing process (Raab 200). When we encounter non-English major students or non-readers in our courses, we have an opportunity to introduce them to forms of writing they do not expect, with results that they cannot anticipate. Chris is now considering a study of psychology and possibly moving into a job that could help other veterans who share the post-traumatic stress disorder that he is working daily to manage. Writing has helped him realize that his 12 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 16 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM writing voicehis perspective, his experience, and his analysis can empower him as a college student, a life-long learner, a writer, a citizen. Conclusion I continue to use the strategies of applying literary elements to students lives in all my literature courses; in taking part, students discover that writing affords them an opportunity to order, analyze, and evaluate the dynamics of their lives, whatever their ages. In this way, they become more aware of the impact of their own stories on themselves and are able find a more intimate as well as intellectual stance within which to experience a work of literature. These students truly have arrived in my academic community, receptive to the experience of creative work and empowered to establish themselves in a literate society by their own written word. Works Cited Bizzell, Patricia. On the Possibility of a Unified Theory of Composition and Literature. Rhetoric Review, vol. 4, 1986, pp. 174-80. Elbow, Peter. The Cultures of Literature and Composition: What Could Each Learn from the Other? College English, vol. 64, no. 5, 2002, pp. 533-46. ---. The War Between Reading and Writingand How to End It. Critical Theory and the Teaching of Literature: Politics, Curriculum, Pedagogy, edited by James F. Slevin and Art Young, National Council of Teachers of English, 1996, pp. 270-91. Gemmell, Rebecca. Encouraging Student Voice in Academic Writing. English Journal, vol. 98, no. 2, 2008, pp. 64-68. Graff, Gerald. Why Study Critical Controversies? The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan. St. Martins, 1995. Jackson, Phoebe. Connecting Reading and Writing in the Literature Classroom. Pedagogy, vol. 5, no. 1, 2005, pp. 111-15. Lovejoy, Kim Brian. Self-Directed Writing: Giving Voice to Student Writers. English Journal, vol. 98, no. 6, 2009, pp. 79-86. Raab, Diana. Creative Transcendence: Memoir Writing for Transformation and Empowerment. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, vol. 46, no. 2, 2014, pp. 187-207. COACHING THE WRITING VOICE 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 17 13 1/22/20 3:10 PM Seitz, James. Questions We Cant Answer: The Secret to a Good Writing Assignment. ADE Bulletin, vol. 154, 2015, pp. 51-56. Stetson, Maura. Freedom of Voice. The English Journal, vol. 85, no. 6, 1996, pp. 74-78. Whittier, Gayle. Alternative Responses to Literature: Experimental Writing, Experimental Teaching. Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas, vol. 68, no. 3, 1995, pp. 167-71. APPENDIX A Portfolio consists of: Four 500-word essays on the literary elements in relation to their lives; first drafts of the above essays, including peer workshop comments from students; reading responses (12-15 typed lines) analyzing an element in the short story/stories assigned for each class meeting; first and final draft of a 1,000-word essay on two or more of the four elements (below) in analyzing a short story from our syllabus (with an academic journal article for support), incorporating also into the essay a paragraph about their reason for choosing the particular author they did; and a self-assessment essay (300 words) reflecting on their writing in the course. APPENDIX B Writing Prompts for essays on the literary elements in their lives: SettingOne of my familys favorite places to be together is. . . . CharacterSomeone not related to me who has impacted my life in a meaningful way is. . . . [or someone I have admired most of my life. . . .] SymbolThis object is an important symbol in my life; it has a history that you could not imagine and makes it especially meaningful for me. DialogueSometimes a conversation stays with a person for a long time; that was the case with this conversation and what happened afterward. APPENDIX C The rest of Shannons story Eventually it was discovered that she had acute pancreatitis caused by a tumor the size of the tip of a pen on her pancreas. My father waited alone through an eight hour surgery in the cold, sterile waiting room. Surgeons removed half of my mothers pancreas and her spleen in late July, 2010. During this harrowing experience, my family stayed strong because of each other. We made sure that each of us was there to comfort one another. We made spending time together and talking about what was on our minds a priority. It was especially difficult for my brother, Tyler. He was young, and did not quite understand 14 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 18 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM that the hospitals, doctors, and IV lines were there to help our mother get better. Without the close relationship my family has, it would have made this time even more difficult for all of us. We knew to take care of each other and to not hide what we were feeling about the situation. My family is comprised only of myself, my brother and our parents; we did not have any other relatives to give their support. It was up to us to support each other through this difficult time. APPENDIX D The rest of Chriss story Please dont slip, please dont fall, PLEASE DONT DROWN; the weight of my gear will pull me under and hold me there like an anchor, let me die anywhere else. I made it, but my buddy is not so fortunate: he slips, thankfully at the edge and we grab him, just in time. Forty degrees outside and he is soaked, you can see the steam rolling off him like the fog of San Francisco. He begins to shake almost to point of convulsions. All stop. We take over a house, its a beautiful little home with nobody inside, must have been abandoned since the initial push into the city, there are bullet holes and a large hole from a rocket launcher facing south, not the best place for a large open hole to be facing. He has changed his clothes and on we goThose damn dogs wont shut up; any louder or any more of them and they will find us for sure. So much for the element of surprise. I hate these damn dogs. They make so much work for me. The incessant barking causes firefights that in turn causes death and dismemberment. We made it. The disgusting hovel that the last platoon left for us, holds trash, shit, empty brass from firefights, and the smell of cordite still engrained in the mud walls. Oh, did I forget to mention the overwhelming smell of chlorine that invades every orifice of your body? I hate this damn country, more specifically this city. I hope it is all worth it. COACHING THE WRITING VOICE 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 19 15 1/22/20 3:10 PM 16 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 20 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM AFFECTING ARGUMENT: STUDENTS LEARNING TO ARGUE AND ARGUING TO LEARN Amy D. Williams Educators have long extolled argument as a cornerstone of academic life and the basis of democratic citizenship. This positive view of argument relies on the belief that argument writing develops critical thinking skills, appreciation for complexity, curiosity about the world, and openness to many points of view. Yet after reviewing twenty-six years of empirical studies about teaching argument, George Newell et al. conclude that we actually know little about how reasonableness and thoughtfulness develop in classroom contexts (297). And some scholars contend that despite popular belief, argument writing may not encourage these qualities at all (DeStigter). Contemporary public discourse offers ample evidence that teaching argumentation does not always result in open, thoughtful dialogue. Alarm over communication in the public square has shifted popular and scholarly attention to the role of affect in argumentation. Some bemoan a lack of civility (Baker and Rogers); others worry that calls for civility undermine progressive causes (Sugrue, Tomlinson). And some scholars suggest that affectboth the affect writers express in argumentative texts and the affect they experience while composing those textscan undermine intellectual inquiry and learning (Felski; Jacobs; Smagorinsky; Tannen; Tompkins). In this article, I follow these scholars in examining the affects writers experience as they learn about and compose argument essays. Specifically, I consider the affective obstacles writers may face as they learn to write arguments and how those obstacles prevent them from developing curiosity, openness, reasonableness, JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 21 VOLUME 34.2 1/22/20 3:10 PM and thoughtfulness. I argue that when argument instruction ignores the impact of affect, writers may learn the generic moves to make in an argument essay, but they are less likely to develop habits of mind that will help them succeed in college writing (Council). My research uses one aspect of a writing classroom ecology pedagogical discourse, or the spoken and written words teachers use when teaching argumentto explore the affects it provokes in students. The data for this paper come from a study conducted with high school writers learning to write arguments in a summer writing workshop. I share examples of students affective responses to pedagogical discourse, including affects that seem to close off open, generous, and critical thinking. I also show that when pedagogical discourse complicates narrow notions of argument as combative and competitive, students affective responses become more muted. These examples suggest that students affective responses to instructional discourse can reinforce an understanding of argument as a form of combat that works against the development of thoughtfulness and critical thinking. Conversely, pedagogical discourse can also encourage a reworking of these instinctual combative stances and affects. Using these findings, I theorize a more productive role for affect in teaching and learning argument, and I offer instructional strategies writing teachers can use to improve argument-writing pedagogies. My purpose is to show how and why affect matters in argument writingnot just when it appears in our students texts but also as it operates in the ecology of our classrooms. Affect, Argument, and the Limits of Reasonableness Peter Smagorinksy recently called for more attention to the gut reactions students experience as they argue and how they work to rationalize [those reactions] through whatever justification they can come up with (98). Like Smagorinsky, I am interested in gut reactions. Rather than labeling them emotions as Smagorinsky does, I use the word affect to draw more explicitly on recent work 18 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 22 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM in affect theory. Affect is how bodies move and become; touch and disturb; influence, alter, shape, entice, and resonate with other bodies and things (including objects, forces, practices, ideas, and values). Affect emerges in connections between things, as they provoke and respond to each other. A more inclusive category than emotion, affect embraces all the visceral sensations and intensities bodies experiencethose we can identify and name and those that remain uncapturable and hard to pin down (Dutro 385). It is an ongoing, everyday rush of vibrations, movements, impulses, dispositions, thoughts, emotions, and feelings that work beneath and alongside conscious knowing and beneath and alongside articulation (Seigworth and Gregg 1). I find this definition of affect helpful in understanding critiques of argument from the scholars I listed above, who describe the affect associated with academic argumentsthe kind of arguments we often ask students to write. Felski calls argument an affective stance that orients us in certain ways (18, italics in original). Using literary criticism as an example of argument, Felski suggests that arguments begin in uncertainty, which almost immediately provokes sensations of fear, anger, repugnance, hyperalertness, and attentiveness. Tannen describes the pain of being on the receiving end of arguments fear, anger, and repugnance (1663). While Felski and Tannen focus on arguments negative affects, Tompkins notes that argument also exhilarates. She compares the affects provoked by academic arguments to those provoked by Western movies. In both, she says, the moment of violence is also a moment of righteous ecstasy, a climax that fills a visceral need and seems biologically necessary (587). Thus Tompkins paints academic arguments affect as both delicious and hardly . . . distinguish[able] from murderousness (587). We can admit a legitimate role for affecteven angry affect in argumentative contexts and still grant that it may be inimical to openness. Felski complains that while arguments ostensible goal is to nurture thoughtfulness, the authors of many published scholarly arguments seem to assume the smartest thing you can do is see through the deep-seated convictions and heartfelt attachments of AFFECTING ARGUMENT 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 23 19 1/22/20 3:10 PM others (16). Tompkins and Tannen concur. A related critique comes from scholars who bemoan the neglect of rhetorical strategies such as silence and listening in argumentation (Glenn and Ratcliffe). By privileging oral and written discourse, both the academy and Western culture as a whole miss powerful opportunities to negotiate and deliberate in multiple ways and to create a different affective climate around argument (3). Taken together, these scholars suggest that our current academic culture does not promote open, thoughtful, and dialogic argumentation. More importantly, all agree that affect in argument is not just the deployment of textual vehemence (Tomlinson 57); it is an integral part of a writers experience while inventing and composing the argument. Researching Pedagogy and Affect To understand students affective experiences while writing argument essays, I conducted this IRB-approved study in an annual two-week summer workshop designed to improve high school students argument-writing skills and to encourage their college attendance. Jointly sponsored by a public school district and a large research university, the workshop enrolls approximately fifty 10th to 12th grade students each summer. The workshop prioritizes enrolling students who have failed a language arts class, have scored below proficient on a state-mandated assessment, or have been identified by a teacher as one who could benefit from focused pedagogical attention. Still, the population is diverse. Some students attend only to earn recovery credit for a failed language arts class. Others are hoping to hone their already strong writing skills. Several participants are enthusiastic writersthough not necessarily enthusiastic academic writers. Many are potential first-generation college students, attracted by the workshops goal of college matriculation. The workshops co-foundersfrom the public school district and the universityare talented, experienced educators committed to helping students succeed as writers and college students. Workshop faculty are secondary teachers from the school district who participate to further their training and career development. 20 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 24 1/22/20 3:10 PM The workshop teaches an acronym as a template for an argument essay: TIRE, or Thesis (in an introductory paragraph), Ideas and Claims (in body paragraphs), Refutation (usually in a penultimate paragraph), and Ending, or conclusion. Intended to help students on language arts proficiency tests and college entrance exams like the ACT, TIRE is what workshop founders call a tool students can lean on as they learn more sophisticated ways of developing and organizing an argument. The curriculum also encourages a robust writing process that includes a variety of research methods, ample revision, and practices of self-regulation and reflection. The data I collected included the workshops curriculum materials, PowerPoint slides, classroom posters, teacher development materials, and handouts; observations and fieldnotes of workshop sessions and faculty meetings; interviews with key faculty and thirty students during the 2016 workshop; and anonymized free-response journals from twenty 2015 workshop students. The students composed the journals in a daily, timed activity during which they were instructed to Keep your hand moving; Let your ideas flow from your brain to your paper; Dont get too logical (classroom poster, emphases in original). The workshop uses the freewrite journals as a way to develop and assess students increasing fluency (as measured by the number of lines written during each timed period). While the journals did not result from my intervention as a researcher, many of the daily prompts concerned the curriculum and writing process, making the journals a valuable source of information about students writing experiences. For this article, I approach affect by paying attention to discourseteachers discourse and students descriptions of their affective experiences. Some affect theorists might object to this linguistic focus. Affect, they would claim, is preliminary to discourse; it is an intensity that does not necessarily have a narrative (Edbauer Rice 201). Others might note that affect and discourse work in opposite directions, affect multiplying potentiality and language enforc[ing] a closure (Corder 18). I resist an affect-discourse binary. Affect cannot be only what is non-articulable; it includes both what can be expressed and the ineffable. Furthermore, affect needs discourse AFFECTING ARGUMENT 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 25 21 1/22/20 3:10 PM because the turn to affect opens up crucial questions about meaningmaking practices, the articulation of the somatic with these, and issues about how the speaking subject makes sense of and communicates affect (Wetherell 353). These crucial questions invite discourse into affect studies. I used the workshops curriculum materials and my fieldnotes to identify prominent elements of pedagogical discourselanguage or ideas that received emphasis through consistent repetition. I then read the journals, interview transcripts, and fieldnotes holistically, looking for and coding students responses to the discourse, especially those related to affective concerns such as embodiment, relationships, connectivity, and movement. I then used axial coding (Corbin and Strauss) to develop relationships between students affective experiences and discursive elements of the workshops pedagogy. However, these relationships may also reflect students past educational experiences. It is possible that the affective responses students describe are unique reactions to the workshops discourse, and it is also possible that the workshops discourse activates affects that originate in previous writing classrooms or other sites. Nevertheless, my methodology allows me to describe a relationship between discourse and students affect. Two repeated patterns in the workshops discourse demonstrate this relationship. Pattern 1: Mixing Metaphors In Western culture, combat metaphors play a prominent role in talk about argument: we defend a position, attack an opponent, fight for our voice to be heard. Abundant research supports the role of such metaphors in structuring not just thought, but also emotion, behavior, and somatic sensations (Lakoff and Johson, CharterisBlack, LeMesurier). Whatever its linguistic and cognitive functions, metaphor also carries affective entailments. Because these affects often work beneath conscious knowing and beneath articulation, they may be particularly hard to dislodge. The workshop purposefully uses alternatives to combat metaphors to encourage the idea of argument as dialogic learning rather than competition or combat. These new metaphors are argument is conversation 22 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 26 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM (dialectic problem-solving), argument is mashup (combining existing forms of knowledge to produce novel ideas), and argument is acting like a college student (being enculturated into patterns of thinking, writing, and behaving). The first two metaphors are rhetorically apt because they utilize vehiclestalking and making musicdrawn from students areas of interest and expertise, while the college student metaphor points to an imagined future. Perhaps more importantly, these metaphors share some affective entailments with the more common combat metaphors while also differing in significant ways. For example, combat and conversation can both provoke excitement, anticipation, and apprehension, but combat is more closely associated with the fear, distrust, and extreme vigilance that move bodies, ideas, and beliefs apart. While conversation, like combat, can spark fear and uncertainty, it also arouses curiosity, interest, and wonder that combat does not. Unlike combat, conversation is an invitation to engage another body, idea, belief, or attitude without violence and sometimes with a willingness to be changed by the interaction. The metaphor of a mashup may also produce beneficial affects. Workshop students know that mashups of film, video, or music generate new art forms from previously discrete, independent, and even contradictory elements. Perhaps even more than conversation, the metaphor of a mashup carries an expectation that relational reworkings will be fruitful. Thus mashup metaphors may elicit affects of excitement, aesthetic appreciation, and surprise and may facilitate sensations of creative movement. Additionally, because mashups reference art forms (music and film) that provoke powerful affective responses, the metaphor may elevate affects through association with those aural and visual stimuli (Anderson). Despite the obvious attraction of these metaphors, they seemed to be a hard sell in the workshop. In 2015, most students still described argument in competitive terms, often using language associated with combat (fighting, reinforcing, beating, and, more graphically, shoving an opinion down [someones] throat). Others described argument as a contest that they were trying to win but did not include violent or threatening references. In all, threeAFFECTING ARGUMENT 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 27 23 1/22/20 3:10 PM quarters of 2015 students described argument in competitive terms, suggesting that most understood and experienced argument metaphorically as an arena where the goal is to win (argument is a contest), even if winning requires some form of violence (argument is war). In 2016, the workshop revised the curriculum to focus more explicitly on the metaphors of conversation, mashup, and college student. During the last week of the 2016 workshop, I interviewed students to understand their responses to the new curriculum (see Appendix). When I asked them to define argument, only three students spontaneously described argument using combat language. Of these, two students said argument is fighting, and one said it is defending a position. If students did not define argument in combative terms, I followed up with this question: Some people, when they talk about argument, describe it as a fight or a war. How accurate do you think that is? An additional eight students agreed with the metaphor. Together, eleven students, or 36.6%, approved an argument is combat metaphor. However, 40% (n=12) of the students rejected the combat metaphor even when it was offered to them, and five students adopted the curriculums language of conversation (n=4) and mashup (n=1) in their answers (see Figure 1). One 2016 student explicitly used the conversation metaphor to reject the combat metaphor: I mean, to describe it as being a war, I feel like is a bit rash. I think its more like a conversation. Even when students did not use conversation or mashup, the entailments of these metaphors seemed to help some students disassociate from more truculent metaphors. For example, one student disagreed that an argument is a fight or a war because there are multiple sides, its calmer, its more civilized, its more diplomatic. While not invoking conversation, this students answer clearly draws on its associations. The difference between students responses in 2015 and 2016 may reflect the more unguarded nature of journal writing versus face-to-face interviews. Nevertheless, it is significant that when the workshops curriculum emphasized alternative metaphors, only three students (10%) spontaneously used pugnacious language in defining argument. And nearly half rejected a combat metaphor 24 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 28 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM Figure 1: Comparison of 2015 Journals and 2016 Interviews Coded for Argument-as-Competition/Combat when it was presented to them. Both Tannen and Kroll (Adversaries) have theorized the value of non-combat metaphors. My data corroborates their claims. Nevertheless, nearly 37% of students continued to conceptualize argument as combat, perhaps reflecting the prominence (and intransigence) of competitive metaphors in Western thought and language. As an example, the workshops thoughtful and intentional educators occasionally reverted to combat metaphors, even when they were trying to show something else. Two pedagogical exchanges that I captured in fieldnotes demonstrate the metaphors insidiousness. Both occurred during the 2016 workshop that prioritized using conversation and mashup metaphors. On the first day, a faculty member introduces the idea of a mashup by displaying a slide with this quote from Mark Twain: There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply AFFECTING ARGUMENT 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 29 25 1/22/20 3:10 PM take old ideas . . . give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. . . . After allowing students to discuss the quote with a neighbor, she asks if anyone agrees with the quote. A student answers, I believe the quote is true because even the television was a new idea . . . but there were drawings and stories and someone combined those ideas. After approving his answer and thanking him, the teacher asks, Did anyone have the opposite? A student raises her hand. I didnt exactly have the opposite, but I thought it wasnt completely true. The teacher responds, So you see there are two spectrums some who think one thing and some who think totally different and some who waffle in between. Twains quote and the pedagogical exchange that follows seem intended to generate a range of responses that will become the material for an argument mashup. The first student eagerly draws on the mashup metaphorshowing how TV combines elements from different creative genres to produce a new medium. The second student disagrees, but only to qualify the first position as not completely true; she hesitates to reject it outright. Her response is notable since both the first students introduction of a truth value and the teachers request for the opposite invite a more competitive stance. The second student refuses to take the bait. Instead her answer (not completely true) raises difficulties around the question, nudging the discussion onto dialectical, conversational ground (Aristotle 265). Rather than pursuing this dialectical possibility, the teacher reinforces a competitive model by speaking of two spectrums that are totally different with those who occupy a middle ground as waffl[ing], a verb with mostly negative connotations. Later in the workshop, an experienced faculty member teaches a lesson on writing an ending for an argument. She notes that the ending follows the refutation and, by way of review, asks, What does refutation mean? A student answers, To redirect. To stop and go in another direction. 26 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 30 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM The teacher immediately replies, Pretty close. Refute means to prove the other side wrong. Its to see that you arent so sunk in your own idea that you cant see another point of view. A refutation is where you can say, Somebody might think differently than you do, but here is why I am right. The students answer is consistent with conversation and mashup metaphors. Redirectcommonly collocated with the conversation suggests the possibility of change and of discovering new purposes or meanings. His answer also associates refutation with affects of movement and hints of embodiment (stop . . . and go). The teachers first responseRefute means to prove the other side wrongmisses an opportunity to nurture the students incipient affective openness. Perhaps sensing this, the teacher quickly moves to a position more aligned with argument as learning (see another point of view, somebody might think differently) before falling back on a more combative moral/ethical framework (I am right). I share these episodes not to critique these teachers, who are both gifted educators. Rather, these instances exemplify the tremendous pull of competitive metaphors for argument and the way language betrays good intentions. On these two brief occasions, skilled teachers exhibited the kind of discursive slippage that likely happens all the time in the teaching of argument writing. Given the predominance of competitive, combative metaphors, such language is bound to appear in our discourse, despite our best efforts to reframe argument as a mode for learning. Students and teachers live in a society saturated with combat metaphors (Tannens combat culture), and this may explain why the 2016 curriculum revisions shift but do not eradicate existing conceptualizations of argument. Additionally, the metaphors of combat and communication are merely different ways of enacting a shared communicative goal. Given that all argument aims to affect or change beliefs or actions, it may be inevitable that one metaphor cannot fully replace the other (Ross and Rossen-Knill 183). AFFECTING ARGUMENT 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 31 27 1/22/20 3:10 PM Pattern 2: Considering the Other Guy A second discursive pattern appears in the workshops teaching of refutation, which they call variously counter argument, counter claim, rebuttal, objection, [or] the other guys ideas. Some of these terms, like counter and rebut, are so closely associated with antagonistic contexts (counterattack, counteroffensive, counterstrike) that connotations of hostility and fighting seem unavoidable. Even the less loaded term objection (with its juridical associations) seems at odds with openness and argument-as-learning. Most commonly, however, the workshop uses the language of the other guy. For example, a PowerPoint slide states that the goal of refutation is to reject ideas from the other side of your argument and lists four bullet points suggesting how young writers might go about this: Understand what the other guy thinks and why Think about the other perspective(s), pick 1 or 2 of the others [sic] guys ideas and decide what YOU think about those ideas Present a counter-argument explaining why you disagree with the other guys ideas Reject the other guys argument because it represents bad reasoning OR concede the point, but as less important than the ideas you have argued (workshop slide, emphases in original) The word other appears six times on this slide alone, and the refrain of What does the other guy think? becomes a recurring motif in the discourse of workshop teachers and students. In essence, the words other guy become shorthand for refutation. This language appears to have important affective consequences. While teachers use the other guy language to encourage empathy for the other guys thinking, students often respond to the other guys character. This unintended result may be due to the curriculums consistent use of the word other to modify guy, an imagined or real person who disagrees with the writer. In the curriculums PowerPoint slides and in teacher talk, the collocation of other and guy is so 28 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 32 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM consistent that linguistically it is the guynot his idea or thinkingthat is other. The repetition of other also emphasizes dissimilarity. The other guy is not just someone who sees things from an alternate perspective; he is intrinsically different, foreign, and alien. This discursive construction may work at the level of insinuation to suggest that workshop students and the other guy have nothing in common. If the students are learning to think like college students, the other guy must be ill-informed and unprincipled. Thus many students respond to the curriculums discourse by viewing the other guy as an adversary and his ideas as an attack on their own. Barry Kroll notes that the standard response to an attack, assuming one chooses not to retreat, is to block and counter attack. This is as true in written argumentation (e.g., refutation, rebuttal, counter claim) as it is in most martial arts (Adversaries 452). In the workshop, students counter the other guy by foregrounding their superior understanding of issues and minimizing the weaknesses of their own arguments. Simultaneously they highlight the other guys limited grasp of the issue and dismiss his incisive observations. Students use various strategies to accomplish this. Sometimes they label the other guy as ignorant (thick-skulled) or naive (someone who doesnt really know about the issue). One student, writing in support of laws to allow guns in schools, responds to objections by drawing attention to the other guys fears. In a journal, the student notes that gun control advocates are afraid of students accessing guns, afraid of teachers harming innocent people, afraid that the presence of guns encourages violence, and afraid that guns may accidentally discharge. While the student lists legitimate concerns, the litany of worries effectively paints the other guy as cowardly and his fears as exaggerated. Furthermore, by suggesting that the other guy is driven by fear, the student intimates that their relationship is fraught, not friendly, thus subtly drawing on the entailments of argument as combat (Felski). A pattern of denigrating the other guys intellect, knowledge, or character is not unique to workshop students. Positive selfpresentation and negative other-presentationwhat linguist Theo Van Dijk labels the ideological square (39)are common features AFFECTING ARGUMENT 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 33 29 1/22/20 3:10 PM of adversarial discourse. But workshop students use of these strategies suggests that as they write, they experience affects appropriate to adversarial situations. This orientation works against curious and hospitable engagement, as students retreat from what Dale Jacobs calls threshold places where they might patiently explore the relationship between their ideas and the other guys. The consistent use of the gendered, singular noun (guy) may also contribute to students perception of argument as having just two sides. One journal prompt asked students to respond to this question: What does the other guy think about my topic? In answering, sixteen of the twenty student journal writers (80%) described argument as having just two sides. In contrast, I did not use the words other guy in any of the 2016 interviews. Of the thirty students interviewed, only thirteen (43%) described argument as two-sided (see Figure 2). Students who saw argument as adversarial used commonplaces such as there are two sides to everything, things are very black and white, and there is no middle ground. More positively, they sometimes reported finding research that compelled them to change sides or that forced themselves to think about the opposite side. Insisting on sides and setting the limit at two forecloses on a multitude of ways students could visualize the conversation (circles, octagons, hexagons, squares, triangles, networks, rhizomes, etc.). These restrictions seemed to reduce students appreciation of an Figure 2: Students Perceptions of Argument as Having Just Two Sides 30 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 34 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM issues complexity. Furthermore, students often polarized the sides along moral or ethical lines. As one student said in an interview, Its like theres two sides into the topic, and, like, one side is, like, about the good stuff, and then the other side is talking about everything thats bad and thats wrong. The notion of two sides also works against some of the hopedfor entailments of conversation and mashup metaphorscuriosity, wonder, desire for engagementthat might reveal complexity and lead to learning. Rather than searching for nuanced answers, students who see issues as black and white look instead for evidence to prove they are on the right side. Besides discouraging openness and thoughtfulness, the other guy language, then, may also discourage rigorous research. The curriculum sometimes unintentionally contributes to scholarly insularity by suggesting that students find credible internet resources through which they can learn both sides of the topic and by directing students to let what they think (rather than what the research says) guide their response to the other guys position. For example, one PowerPoint slide reads: pick 1 or 2 of the others [sic] guys ideas and decide what YOU think about those ideas (emphasis in original). The workshop students two-sided approach to argument is not unique. Ursula Wingates study of first-year undergraduate students found that many students hold a similarly narrow concept of argument, a tendency she links to curricula that focus on a thesisantithesis-synthesis essay structure (149). And Tannen observes a similar pattern of simplifying arguments to two manageable positions in texts ranging from student papers to peer-reviewed articles, where authors position their work in opposition to someone elses that they then prove lacking in some way. Students may adopt these frameworks because they have been taught explicit formulas for writing argument essays or because they see established scholars using similar formats. But they may also adopt antagonistic stances because those stances align with affects that the workshops pedagogical discourse provokes in them. AFFECTING ARGUMENT 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 35 31 1/22/20 3:10 PM On its face, refutation encourages openness since students must consider ideas that differ from their own. Teaching students to include a refutation in their essay could prompt them to examine their own perspectives to find connections with the perspectives of others (Council 4). In the workshop, every students final essay included a refutation sectionusually one paragraph immediately before the conclusion. The refutation section offers textual evidence of the authors openness and critical thinking. But applying an affective lens to students experiences while writing these essays suggests that a texts refutation section is not a wholly reliable indicator of students openness and learning. An Affective Theory for Teaching Argument As a result of this research, I believe that argument writing instruction is more likely to result in thoughtfulness, curiosity, and openness when it produces affects that support those habits of mind: namely, affects associated with connectivity, relationships, and movement. Before giving an example from the data, I outline recent scholarship that aligns connectivity, relationships, and movement with argument as a form of learning. As I noted above, Krista Ratcliffe has proposed listening as an inventional strategy that interrupts arguments negative affective cycle. Rhetorical listening occurs in the shared atmosphere of gaps between self and otherthe excess where we adjoin but do not overlap (71). Ratcliffe uses the imagery of an energy field to represent these places of non-identification. Containing everything that cannot neatly fit within a framework of difference and commonalities, these energy fields become places of pure affective movement and connection, places where multiple relationships form and reform, and places where openness is born. The relational possibilities of Ratcliffes energy fields mirror Dale Jacobs metaphor for argument as a kind of hospitality centered in threshold spaces where encounters between the self and others occur. Prioritizing the gathering (rather than the competing) sense of the word agon, Jacobs proposes argument as a form of hospitality that invites bodies and ideas over thresholds of division and into 32 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 36 1/22/20 3:10 PM shared space. Hospitality is thus movement that engages rather than vanquishes. Both Ratcliffes rhetorical listening and Jacobss hospitality are affectively relationalthey emerge in purposeful movement toward and recognition of an ineluctable interdependence of bodies, objects, and things. In this affective betweenness, binaries of self and other collapse into more nuanced and productive connections. I explore the idea of relational/connective/moving affect by considering the writing experience of a workshop student I call Jordan. Jordan was an outlier among students because of the metacognitive way he talked about his attempts to develop openness as a writer. His journal suggests that affect helped him practice new ways of being and thinking in the world as he wrote an argument essay (Council 4). Jordan described himself as a confident writer, citing a history of teachers praising his writing ability. He recounted the positive feelings he experiences when he finishes a writing assignment and said he motivates himself to write by imagining people in the future reading and praising his work. His writing confidence, then, appears fully relational and affective; it relies on intensities that form between others responses (real and projected) and his own writing body. In turn, this positive and secure writerly identity seems foundational to his openness and learning. Other scholars have noticed a connection between writing confidence and experiencing writing as learning (Johnson and Krase), and this appears true for Jordan as well. For example, Jordan described opening himself to other views by asking his mother questions about his ideas and claims. He said he knows that his mother will answer in ways that challenge his thinking, and he admits often not liking the answers he receives. Jordans learning strategy (asking questions) represents a risky revelation of the self and a willingness to plunge on alone, with no assurance of welcome from the other (Corder 26). Significantly, Jordan said he asks his mother difficult questions because his mother knows that he is smart and a skilled writer and thinker. It is telling that Jordan follows the description of his courageous practice with an immediate affirmation of his intellectual and writerly identity, the affective and relational basis of which he has already established. AFFECTING ARGUMENT 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 37 33 1/22/20 3:10 PM Jordan also experiences openness as movement. He likes writing about questions and issues for which he doesnt have a ready response because, he said, it gives you space and room to look around, research, and gather thoughts and information, that you may have not thought of before. Here he figuratively represents the experience of openness as embodied sensations that encompass temporality (space and room), require movement (look and gather), and ultimately lead to knowledge (things you may have not thought of before). Jordans conceptualization of openness aligns with Krolls invitation for students to think about patterns of argument with their muscles and sinews and joints (Adversaries 464). Thus Jordan enacts, albeit tentatively, an affective and embodied model of openness that writing teachers could encourage. With my research and Jordans experience in mind and with the goal of encouraging argument as a form of learning, I have made changes in my first-year writing classeschanges that I hope arouse affects of connection, relationship, and movement. I believe these affects support the development of both openness and critical thinking more generally. First, I introduce my students to Lakoff and Johnsons idea of conceptual metaphors. We discuss the everyday language associated with these metaphors. For example, I ask, What language or figures of speech do we use that suggests we conceptualize time as money? We also explore the affective consequences language and metaphors impose on bodies: If you conceptualize time as money, how do you experience time? How else might we conceptualize time? How would this change our experiences? Many of my students come from or have lived in cultures that conceptualize time through metaphors other than money. Their experiences contribute to a robust discussion in which students explore different metaphors and the behaviors, values, and lifestyles those metaphors support. For example, I have had several students describe the more relaxed relationship to time they see in Polynesian countries. They speculate that island cultures may conceptualize time using metaphors related to ocean tides, allowing people to experience time as consistently 34 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 38 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM abundant. These discussions help students see how metaphors can constrain our ability to think and act in certain ways. Second, we explore students experiences with argument and openness. I ask my students what they think the word argument means. We talk about when, where, and how they have argued, and I ask them to describe those experiences. While some students have had experiences where argument felt like cooperation and learning, most describe it as a competitive or confrontational activity. I ask them how many times they have mentioned having an argument with a boyfriend, girlfriend, parent, roommate, coworker, or boss and had someone respond, Thats great! What did you learn? We talk about the predominance of competitive orientations to argument and the prevalence of combat metaphors. We list language associated with argument and combat and the affects that language could produce. We talk about how an argument-as-combat metaphor might limit the ways we respond to new or challenging information. I then ask students to consider where and when they feel open to new things, ideas, people, or experiences. I ask them to describe affects associated with openness. What does openness feel like in their bodies? What sensations do they experience when they encounter new things without resistance? What language and metaphors do they associate with those experiences? Together we try to imagine metaphors that capture affects of opennessconnection, relationships, and movementand apply them to argument (argument is visiting a new country, argument is meeting a new friend, argument is speed dating). We make these new metaphors a prominent part of classroom discussions. I encourage alternatives to the combat metaphor and warlike language because, with Kroll and Tannen, I believe these new metaphors can shift students cognitive and affective responses. Besides the metaphors students create, I use the argument-asconversation metaphor and Burkes idea of the parlor extensively (in part because the word parlor always elicits some laughter). I also try to monitor the language I use. For example, instead of asking what the other guy thinks, I ask, What additional ways are there of thinking about this issue? How do those ways of thinking make AFFECTING ARGUMENT 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 39 35 1/22/20 3:10 PM sense to people? Still, I know that I cannot eliminate all combative and competitive language; I am constantly correcting myself as I teach. I also know that alternative metaphors are unlikely to fully replace combat metaphors. So I have found it helpful to involve my students in critiquing the relationship between metaphor and affect and to offer my own pedagogical language for critical analysis. I also know that not all students experience combat metaphors negatively. And there are times when an adversarial response is appropriate (Tomlinson). I tell students that I want their repertoire of argumentative stances to match the variety of argumentative situations they will encounter in and outside of my classroom (Kroll Differently). I find it helpful, then, to encourage my students to practice many ways of learning from and communicating within difference. To prevent students from becoming sedimentary about any single argumentative approach, I try to help my students see that it is only after they have learned about an issue and the positions surrounding it that they can choose an appropriate argumentative stance. If they begin with an adversarial orientation, it becomes hard to enact different moves or to forge different connections later on. One way I forestall students committing to a particular stance is by having them begin researching a topic in groups, posing and answering broad research questions around that topic rather than around a thesis (or around a thesis masquerading as a research question). I encourage students to see themselves as nomads, traveling through and mapping the conversation they find in the literature. The metaphor of traveling prepares students to discover and evaluate unfamiliar ideas and perspectives; the metaphor of mapping keeps them situated in a relevant conversation. After working as a group to understand the existing landscape of the issue, students decide individually on a claim, thesis, and argumentative stance. In the end, a student may still take an adversarial, combative approach to argumentation, but I always appreciate the conversations that lead to that choice. Finally, I look for ways beyond the essay to assess students learning. The formulaic conventions of essay templates like TIRE do not inherently demand sincere conversations in which one works 36 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 40 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM outthrough back-and-forth engagement with others perspectives what one truly believes. Additionally, students texts do not always faithfully reflect their experiences while writing. Following TIRE or similar formats, students may include a token refutation without seriously appreciating other peoples ideas. Conversely, as noted above, students may produce essays that show little sign of openness despite having rich dialectal experiences while researching and writing. One pedagogical implication of my study, then, is the need to evaluate what an argument essay can reveal about student learning. An essay that includes a refutation may indicate that a student is developing openness as a habit of mind. But we will have a better sense of their willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world (Council) if we also understand their affective experiences while writing. We might, then, ask students to reflect on their affective experiences while writing the essay. At what points in the writing process did they experience affects associated with connectivity, relationships, and generative movement? When were those affects, in the words of one student in my study, shut down? Asking students to become aware of affect doesnt mean that students will be able to control their affective responsesaffect is, by its very nature too diffuse, emergent, and unpredictable for that. But we can teach students to slow what Kathleen Stewart calls the quick jump from affectthe tight chest, the racing heart, the fluttering stomach, the quivering legsto thoughts and evaluations. If students resist the urge to label affects (Im angry) or interpret affects (Shes wrong!), they are better able to view their affective responses as invitations to explore new ways of approaching the complex and uncertain objects [ideas, perspectives, people] that fascinate because they literally hit us or exert a pull on us (Stewart 4, see also Dutro). Ultimately, students may also learn to cultivate affects that support openness. Conclusion Affect matters. We may want to assume that teaching argumentative writing will develop our students into open and curious thinkers AFFECTING ARGUMENT 37 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 41 1/22/20 3:10 PM the possibility certainly exists. But we cannot presume that outcome without taking into account students affective responses, which can undermine teachers efforts to make argument writing a learning activity. Affect can hinder students ability to practice the openness, curiosity, and critical thinking that argument writing is designed to promote. If we accept argument writing as a pedagogical imperative, we must also accept an obligation to think about the affects writers experience in writing arguments and how those affects sustain or compromise openness, curiosity, and thoughtfulness. The pedagogical strategies I describe in this articleexamining metaphors, imagining new metaphors, talking about affect, and finding multiple ways to assess openness and learningcan help students recognize and appreciate the affective milieu within which they encounter and produce arguments. When students understand that openness and curiosity are both cognitive and affective responses, they are more likely to develop these habits of mind. If our writing pedagogies acknowledge the affective dimensions of argument, our students will be more likely to experience argument as learning. Works Cited Anderson, Ben. Becoming and Being Hopeful: Towards a Theory of Affect. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 24, 2006, pp. 733-52. Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. 2nd ed. Translated by George A. Kennedy, Oxford University Press, 2007. Baker, Peter, and Katie Rogers. In Trumps America, the Conversation Turns Ugly and Angry, Starting at the Top. New York Times, 20 June 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/us/politics/trump-languageimmigration.html. Accessed 22 August 2018. Charteris-Black, Jonathon. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor, Palgrave, 2005. Corbin, Juliet M., and Anselm Strauss. Grounded Theory Research: Procedures, Canons, and Evaluative Criteria. Qualitative Sociology, vol. 13, no. 1, 1990, pp. 3-21. Corder, Jim. Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love. Rhetoric Review, vol. 4, no. 1, 1985, pp. 1632. 38 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 42 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English, and National Writing Project. Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. CWPA, NCTE, and NWP, 2011. DeStigter, Todd. On the Ascendance of Argument: A Critique of the Assumptions of Academes Dominant Form. Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 50, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1134. Dutro, Elizabeth. How Affect Theory Can Support Justice in Our Literacy Classrooms: Attuning to the Visceral. Language Arts, vol. 96, no. 6, 2019, pp. 384-89. Edbauer Rice, Jenny. The New New: Making a Case for Critical Affect Studies. Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 94, no. 2, 2008, pp. 20012. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. University of Chicago Press, 2015. Glenn, Cheryl, and Krista Ratcliffe, editors. Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts. Southern Illinois University Press, 2011. Jacobs, Dale. The Audacity of Hospitality. JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, vol. 28, no. 3 & 4, 2008, pp. 563-81. Johnson, J. Paul, and Ethan Krase. Affect, Experience, and Accomplishment: A Case Study of Two Writers, from First-Year Composition to Writing in the Disciplines. Journal ofTeaching Writing, vol. 27, no. 2, 2012, pp. 1-26. Kroll, Barry M. Arguing Differently. Pedagogy, vol. 5, no. 1, 2005, pp. 3760. --. Arguing with Adversaries: Aikido, Rhetoric, and the Art of Peace. College Composition and Communication, vol. 59, no. 3, 2008, pp. 45172. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, 1980. LeMesurier, Jennifer Lin. Somatic Metaphors: Embodied Recognition of Rhetorical Opportunities. Rhetoric Review, vol. 33, no. 4, 2014, pp. 36280. Newell, George E., Richard Beach, Jamie Smith, and Jennifer VanDerHeide. Teaching and Learning Argumentative Reading and Writing: A Review of Research. Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 3, 2011, pp. 273-304. Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Ross, Donald, and Deborah Rossen-Knill. Features of Written Argument. Argumentation, vol. 30, no. 2, 2016, pp. 181-205. Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. An Inventory of Shimmers. The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg & Gregory J. Seigworth, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 1-25. Smagorinsky, Peter. Emotion, Reason, and Argument: Teaching Persuasive Writing in Tense Times. English Journal, vol. 107, no. 5, 2018, pp. 98-101. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press, 2007. AFFECTING ARGUMENT 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 43 39 1/22/20 3:10 PM Sugrue, Thomas J. White Americas Age-Old, Misguided Obsession with Civility. The NewYork Times, 29 June 2018. www.nytimes.com/2018/06/ 29/opinion/civility-protest-civil-rights.html. Accessed 16 August 2018. Tannen, Deborah. Agonism in Academic Discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 34, no. 10-11, 2002, pp. 1651-69. Tomlinson, Barbara. Feminism and Affect at the Scene of Argument: Beyond the Trope of the Angry Feminist. Temple University Press, 2010. Tompkins, Jane. Fighting Words: Unlearning to Write the Critical Essay. The Georgia Review, vol. 42, no. 3, 1988, pp. 585-90. Wetherell, Margaret. Affect and DiscourseWhats the Problem? From Affect as Excess to Affective/Discursive Practice. Subjectivity, vol. 6, no. 4, 2013, pp. 349-68. Wingate, Ursula. Argument! Helping Students Understand What Essay Writing Is About. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, vol. 11, 2012, pp. 145-54. Van Dijk, Teun A. Opinions and Ideologies in the Press. Approaches to Media Discourse, edited by Allan Bell & P. Gerret, Blackwell, 1998, pp. 21-63. APPENDIX INTERVIEW PROTOCOL (QUESTIONS RELEVANT TO FINDINGS OF THIS ARTICLE) I want to ask some questions about the writing you do in school and at the workshop. And I just want to say again that this isnt a test. There are no right or wrong answers. How important do you think it is to be able to write argument essays like the one you are writing here in the workshop? Probe: Where else do you think you might write an essay like this? Think about writing an argument and try to describe what it feels like while you are writingyour emotions or thoughts or how your body feels. How would you define argumentative writing? Probe: Some people describe argument writing as a fight or war? How accurate do you think that is? What do you think you are good at in writing argument essays? 40 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 44 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE: UNDERSTANDING (CRITICAL) COMPOSITION FOR THE INDIAN IMMIGRANT STUDENT Nidhi Rajkumar In Who Can Afford Critical Consciousness? David Seitz studies several multicultural, minority students, some of whom are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Seitz examines the inherent disconnect between these immigrant students perceptions of the writing course and their real lives beyond the composition classroom. To me the title Who Can Afford Critical Consciousness? itself suggests the dichotomy between the inherent value of composition and its perceived value in the eyes of immigrant students. There is a disparity in the engagement such writing demands from the students and the price these students must pay to succeed in it. This price is the students investment while the cost is the time such an engagement demands. The cost is high because this time comes from time allocated to subjects, particularly the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) courses that hold a higher value than composition studies in the eyes of these immigrant students and their families. In the case of several immigrant students, particularly South Asian and Chinese students, the value of one subject against another is defined by its place in a disciplinary hierarchy which is in turn determined by the cultural pedagogical ideology that immigrant students often bring into the composition classroom (Mervis; Suarez-Orozco, Bang and OConnor; Hale). This is a price that the student has to pay despite the cost being much higher than what the student might be willing to or able to pay. I examine this issue from the perspective of an Indian immigrant student, and arguments that I present are informed from my own JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 45 VOLUME 34.2 1/22/20 3:10 PM experiences as an Indian immigrant composition student, scholar and teacher. I further inform my observations through recommendations that are based on scholarship that examines this disconnect between the (Indian) immigrant student and the American college level composition class. It is important to note at this point that even though this is from and about Indian immigrant composition students, scholars, and teachers, several of the observations will resonate with other immigrant student groups, specifically the Pakistanis and the Bangladeshis. My inquiry begins with Seitzs study on an Indian immigrant student and her Indian immigrant teacher and stays within reaching distance of the context established by Seitz. Yet, it is important to underscore that all the questions this paper asks and explores can extend to other immigrant composition students and teachers who are in similar situations. Seitz presents Gita, a student in a composition class and her writing teacher, Rashmi. Gita is a first-generation Indian immigrant and business student who strongly identifies with a dual frame of reference, specifically her American-bred ideal for individual freedoms compared with the gender constraints of her Indian social networks (76). Comparatively, there is little on Rashmi, except that she is Gitas writing teacher and is, to me by all indications, an Indian immigrant as well. Seitz introduces Gita as one of the first in his study who openly admitted to zoning out during class discussions because she viewed them as irrelevant to her life, especially her academic life. Gitas persistent, almost stubborn determination not to engage with these issues becomes the overarching theme of this particular case study and is also an example of what several Indian immigrant students in American writing classes experience. Contextualizing Perspectives Before I continue, it is important for me to establish my positionality in this study and contextualize my perspectives. I see myself as Gita as well as Rashmi because of the experiences that make me identify with both. I am Gita in that I too am an Indian immigrant student, with a dual frame of reference walking between two worlds of being American and Indian simultaneously. I am also Rashmi, a 42 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 46 1/22/20 3:10 PM writing teacher who finds herself very often standing across this great divide, unable to connect with a students inability to overcome built-in, traditionally determined pedagogical constructs. I also place myself in a third role as a composition scholar attempting to examine this issue from my unique vantage point of Indian immigrant student, teacher and scholar. These multiple positionalities illustrate the role that culturally defined career and professional goals play in the life of an Indian immigrant student like Gita. The importance that STEM fields hold for the Indian communities is evident in the annual Open Doors report from the Institute of International Education. The report states that 42% of the 886,000 international students enrolled in American universities in 2013-2014 were from India and China. Furthermore, an analysis of enrollment by discipline shows that STEM fields accounted for 45% of immigrant students enrolled at the undergrad level. This is significant because many of the immigrant students enrolled in first-year writing are from these STEM fields. Their academic choices embody this hierarchy of disciplines that is both overtly and covertly reinforced through the traditionally defined cultural environment from which students like them and Gita, come. Gita, Seitz writes, acted from two sets of seemingly conflicting convictions. [One was] her socioeconomic situation as part of a first-generation Indian immigrant family [that] shaped her practical views of labor and a free market economy (97). The second was her social concerns (97), which in this case was centered around issues of gender within sociocultural contexts. As the Indian immigrant teacher, I have seen this phenomenon repeatedly semester after semester in my own classes. One writing assignment always focuses on the students journey that ends in my classroom. Thus far without exception I have seen that all my students from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are (1) always from the STEM fields and (2), have almost always faced family resistance if they chose writing in any form, as a career. As an immigrant child I understand the reasons, accuracy, and implications of this almost normalized narrative, yet as a writing teacher I find myself on the other side of this divide. As a teacher I articulate the guiding purpose BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 47 43 1/22/20 3:10 PM of education as inculcating intellectual authority in my students that will eventually lead to their intellectual autonomy. This, I believe, is essential to empowering them both as individuals and for the society at large. However, over the years it has become evident to me that as a teacher of composition, the effort is torn between what we as teachers see as the means to inculcating this intellectual authority and the reality of an immigrant students lack of engagement in this process. My third standpoint is that of the Indian immigrant composition scholar who believes in a multicultural approach in all aspects of the discipline. Brice Horner, Samantha NeCamp, and Christiane Donahue argue for a multilingual approach in not only their teaching but also their scholarship (269) and I borrow this idea and extend it to include an acknowledgement of multiculturalism in composition teaching and scholarship. In much the same way that Horner, NeCamp, and Donahue acknowledge the shift within composition studies that challenges the hegemony of English monolingualism and everything that goes with it (271), I propose that a similar understanding and sensitivity to acknowledging multicultural forces that act upon the Indian immigrant students in the writing classroom could redefine the dominance of any one culture in a multicultural writing classroom. As a scholar when I step back and look at Gita and Rashmis situation, I notice clearly the disconnect between what Gita sees as irrelevant versus course work that Rashmi sees as important. If we are to effectively address this, we need to first identify the problem. The next step is then to identify some of the key factors that play into this problem, and finally we need to find ways in which we can address this problem in the reality of the classroom. These steps will at best eventually lead to the building of bridges across this great divide, or at the very least it will better explain the challenges that immigrant, specifically Indian immigrant, students face in a composition class. In this way, we as teachers can begin to address them. The problem of this divide between Gitas lack of engagement in a process that will eventually lead to inculcating intellectual authority and Rashmis inability to engage Gita requires an examination of both 44 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 48 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM perspectives. However, I place the onus of bridging this divide more on the composition teacher and in their acknowledging and incorporating the multiple sociocultural contexts that come into the writing classrooms. This, I believe, is critical if we, as teachers of composition, strive to motivate and inspire intellectual authority in our students. Despite my multiple positionalities, I do not claim singular credit for identifying or naming this divide. Scholars like Seitz, Ira Shor, and Lisa Delpit, to name a few, have examined this divide, albeit under other names and from varying perspectives. I will come back to these names as I define the problem, and I will conclude by proposing some suggestions that will lessen the divide in the day-to-day reality of the composition course. Understanding Gita As I approach Gita and Rashmi from my perspective as an Indian immigrant, I am hardly surprised at Gitas inability to fully engage in the composition class. Sabrina Eveland analyzed South Asian immigrant students in American universities and found that the stable career path prevalent among second generation South Asians who feel pressure from society to assimilate, while being dually pressured by their parents to attain success (34) was common. She sees the value of her work for educators as well as administrators, so they can understand why there are so many South Asian students oriented towards the math, science, engineering, and medical fields of study (34). More importantly, she gives more insight into both the influences behind academic success among South Asian students and the internal and inter-familial stress that can occur when South Asian students (must) pursue courses of study their parents do not support (34). This insight is the key to understanding this problem and to getting the students to successfully engage with any course. This success can be defined in Freirean terms. In light of scholarship like Evelands and my own cultural exposure to the disciplinary hierarchy that is built into the Indian family, Gitas zoning out in her writing class is not unusual or surprising. However, I am fascinated by Rashmis inability to pick up on what BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 49 45 1/22/20 3:10 PM might be happening to Gita behind the scenes considering Rashmi seems to be an Indian immigrant as well. Outlining the reality of being an immigrant student and a teacher in the place and space that is the American composition classroom is deceptively simple. Here place and space are distinct, in that place is the physical classroom, while space in this context means the internal connotations of what it means to belong to this world of critical writing, as a student and as a teacher. This is because it involves breaking up this experience into two identities one of Rashmi and another of Gita and everything that they must stand for. These identities must then be examined from a highly specific context of the Indian immigrant student and the culturally defined pedagogical perspectives that become baggage they bring into the writing classroom. It is this perspective that prevents them from engaging with the composition process that, when all is said and done, is being forced on them. Molded by a certain sociocultural ideology that defines how they view education in terms of its function and purpose, these students resist composition as a subject not because they want to, but because they are culturally conditioned to. Gitas disinterest, its reasons, and the implications when teachers fail to see these cultural forces that shape student motivation are of central importance. In order to explain the situation of the Indian immigrant student in an American writing class and the studentteacher dynamic, Paulo Freire is immensely useful. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire makes a case for why education is the salvation of the oppressed. Freire goes on to state that it is education that will give humanity freedom, which in this context is intellectual authority. It is what I, as a teacher of writing, want for my students and know must come from the students themselves. According to Freire, this freedom comes in two ways: first, drawing a distinction between thought and action as shaped by genuine love as opposed to the thought that has been conditioned by the oppressors model of humanity, and second, freeing the oppressed by getting them to reject this adherence to the oppressor that has by now become central to the identity of the oppressed, at least in the minds of the 46 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 50 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM oppressed. To be sure, Freire is significant because Gitas situation is directly translatable in Freirean terms. Gita would be representative of Freires oppressed, or the student who needs this awakening to gain her freedom from an oppressive socio-cultural reality embodied in the cultural mandates that surround her. The irony becomes evident as Gita seeks her freedom through another oppressive pedagogical system that she is unable to identify with but promises to relieve her of the more oppressive of her two prisons. The reason that the pedagogical system in this case is oppressive is that Gita is not a part of it in the Freirean sense. She is disconnected, uninvolved, and fails to find the validity of her experiences and what it means to be Gita in the context of this pedagogy. This is a system that is forcing liberation on her, and does not allow her to win her own liberation. Gita openly admitted that she zoned out during class discussions that she felt did not directly affect her life or academic progress through the course (89), and this demonstrates the contradictions and the divide that reinforce the oppression that Freire associates with the internally divided oppressed individual. Gitas conflicting convictions are her socioeconomic situation as part of a firstgeneration Indian immigrant family and her views of labor and a free market economy, both consequences of her socioeconomic situation. Gitas oppressors are defined by this single-minded goal held by many parents in her extended family . . . and their lack of higher education [that] may prevent them from seeing valuable opportunities aside from the high-status medical professions (97). Gita is trapped between two cultures and time periods and the freedom that she seeks is embodied in the dream of moving to Australia, far away from her socio-cultural oppressors who are personified collectively in her family and relatives, to whom she remains chained. That is why Gita will embrace this oppressive pedagogical systembecause of the freedom it promises her. However, I argue that without intellectual authority, Gita does not stand much of a chance of any kind of freedom simply because the belief of her oppressors will otherwise remain embedded within her as part of her identity. Unless she tries to redefine herself in terms BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 51 47 1/22/20 3:10 PM of her identity as a human being, she will remain chained irrespective of where she tries to go. At some level she is well aware of this, but seems unwilling, perhaps unable to grapple with the meaning of what remains evident yet unsaid, so she pulls back from being rebellious. She says But I cant do that. See, I put my parents and my brother first, my relatives next, and then myself . . . (qtd. in Seitz101). The But signals her perception of no way out and the paradox is that until she sees the relevance of critical education in the process of (re)constructing the self, until she can bridge that perceived chasm that lies between what she wants and what she is being offered, she will never begin her self-liberating move towards intellectual authority and freedom as a human being. Evelands study clearly demonstrates the traditional South Asian attitude towards following a well charted recipe for success that pushes the student towards choosing a career that is high paying (36). This pressure is passed down from one generation to the next and the Indian immigrant student finds themselves in the narrow space between pleasing ones parents and pursuing ones own interests; of following the tried and true versus walking down the road less traveled; and of retaining cultural values or assimilating the dominant culture in a new country (Eveland 36). This is the position that Gita and several others like her find themselves in and is what we must acknowledge if we want to reach across this divide. I have previously expressed my confusion at what manifests as Rashmis inability to understand the influences that are acting on Gita and that are influencing her attitude towards the course. Firstyear writing classes are, for the most part, taught by graduate student instructors in the role of TAs (Connors). These graduate students are an important part of this equation, yet there is a dearth of research in writing studies on this population while the field itself diversifies (Ruecker, Frazier and Tseptsura 613). To understand the contrary forces that divide the Indian immigrant students perspective of what is being provided and how a writing class is of value, I look to understanding the immigrant teacher. 48 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 52 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM Michael Hale writes a nation of immigrants is holding another nation of immigrants in bondage (18) and Rashmi and Gitas situation is an illustration of this reality in the writing classroom. Hale uses the larger immigration debate to get his students to reflect on the problem of misinformation and the role of critical writing. In this process he states that his primary concern is to get his students engaged in the debate in the here and now and to help them develop a sense of agency that makes them active participants in the debate both within and without the writing classroom. Diana Belcher outlines the forces that define an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) writing classroom they are need based, pragmatic, cost-efficient and functional and of these the more critically oriented classroom would be accommodationist, assimilationist, market driven, and colonizing (134). I would argue that several of these descriptive terms would be ones that define our own composition pedagogies. As teachers work towards these ends, Belcher uses past scholarship to point out that teacher intuition and knowledge of language systems (are) insufficient, and that understanding of language use in specific contexts (is) essential (136). Much the same way as I extended Horners argument on acknowledging multilingualism to composition scholarship to include multiculturalism in composition classrooms, I extend Belchers observations into the critical writing classroom. Just as Belcher argues for encouraging a complex view of context and to consider social perspective, I argue that it is essential for the teacher of critical pedagogy to consider the discourse domain. Belcher defines discourse domain as the continually changing and dynamic context constructed by those engaged in communication (136). Understanding the Disconnect Ira Shor presents the student-teacher disconnect through the seating pattern of the students in his writing classes. Shor observed and found that several students moved in passive, silent protest, and chose to stay beyond the physical and intellectual reach of the teacher by choosing to sit in the remote Siberia of the classroom. This Siberian Syndrome, Shor noted, negatively impacted the effectiveness, even the legitimacy of his authority as a teacher. Shor BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE 49 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 53 1/22/20 3:10 PM felt that this studenthood is hardly passive because this passivity is being actively constructed by the students as a manifestation of what Henry Giroux (1983 and 1988) called students resistance to schooling. Contrary to what is understood to be the proper, learned, and expected routine professional behavior of what teacherhood and studenthood imply, Shor writes, Students are constructing the subordinate self at the same time that are resisting and undermining it, while believing that their real selves, and real lives, are somewhere else, not contaminated or controlled by this dominating process (17). Shor acknowledges his authority and begins to recount in graphic and minute detail the disturbing and hilarious moments he spent in the Siberia of his classroom. Shor tries to establish the learning process as a cultural forum . . . for the negotiation of meanings, it helps to get students thoughts and feelings into the open as soon as possible (34). To me this is a prerequisite to understanding the internal forces that compel students, perhaps like Gita, to move into the Siberias of the writing class, either emotionally/mentally, physically or both. Another important tool that Shor employs is the democratic composition pedagogical model. Shor argues that when the students are treated as reflective constituents who are consulted in the making of their education (35) it makes them intellectually involved. I believe that students agency and investment in their composition courses will eventually inculcate the intellectual authority that I see as a highly desirable aim of a composition course. Ideal as this sounds, Shor points to moments when the students resist even these attempts at bridging the teacher-student divide by presenting this as the classroom-corporate boardroom divide. It is important to establish that corporate boardroom is not the florescentlight filled boardrooms of the corporate world, but is used as a standin for everything that students perceive as their real-life as divorced from the writing classroom. Shor defines this disconnect in the students expectations of the teacher as one who will do most of the talking, because thats the way education has been done to them so far (67) (my emphasis). His choice of words is important to me because they point to the students passive, receptacle-like role where they are being talked at and where the teacher is firmly in command (6750 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 54 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM 68). Shor returns to this contradiction [that exists] between the actual and the apparent functions of schooling, which make school a warehouse instead of a learning center and which takes a toll on the student who is pulled in opposite directions (9). This disillusionment is heightened as the social prestige of college coupled with the centrality of a college degree and getting a job makes this a highstakes situation for these Indian immigrant students and their families. These stakes are further heightened because a failure to comply has some very serious ramifications; unemployment, welfare, crime, the Army, struggling with self-employment or marrying money (Shor, 16). Education, in Freirean terms, is a reinforcement of the oppression because it is not in tandem with the oppressed and is therefore doomed to failure. It is toxic to the realization of being human, and the system is not accountable for its failure. Cooling off is how this often plays out, as the disconnect between the students goals and the methods in which they previously and truly believed, fail to get them to their dreams of self-actualization, intellectual authority, and freedom (Shor). Shor sums up by saying All conflicts of American life converge in school, turning education into . . . battlefields for the conflicting interests of the state and the people (40). What is lost in this process is the students ability to critically reflect which in turn keeps them from becoming agents of social change. A greater loss is the awareness of this contradiction between a flawed system and broken aspirations that makes the students increasingly more disenchanted with the entire process of education. A teachers helplessness when faced with students defined by such a reality is hard enough. Add to this the parental and societal pressures that reinforce this belief in an education system that transfers its failures on the students. Now, also add the costs of what most Indian immigrant families must pay in various ways so their children can get an American education and the stakes become unimaginably high. These students must make the choices that are determined by their elders who are culturally revered to a point where questioning their authority is not an option. This comes back to the original problem that I see for Gita and Rashmi. Gita is the Indian immigrant BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 55 51 1/22/20 3:10 PM student who must realize her dreams with her American degree in Business, while Rashmi is left trying to break through a wall made up of traditionally defined norms, parental and socially dictated choices, and a students burning desire for freedom. All that Rashmi has is her own belief in the value of what she is teaching and its role in Gitas process of self-realization. I see this situation as unintentional, but common and damaging nonetheless. I would argue that its real danger comes from its unintentionality. Lisa Delpit enters this conversation from the standpoint of a teacher who is looking at the educational system as something that is being done to other peoples children. Delpit recalls observing white conservatives and liberals battling each other over what was good for these other peoples children while excluding from the conversation those with the most to gain or lose by its outcome (6). To Delpit, the disconnect is between the establishment and the students who are affected by its policies. Delpit draws on her personal experience to address this disconnect the memories of herself as a graduate student and what she considered valuable moments in learning. She writes, I also learned in graduate school that people learn to write not by being taught skills and grammar, but by writing in meaningful contexts (12). Her assignments are nontraditional in that she has her students write books, weave baskets, play games, and redecorate the interiors of their learning spaces. She admits that her methods worked, Well, at least it worked for some of the children (13). Interestingly, the group of students for whom these nontraditional methods worked best were her minority (black) students who were not progressing by traditional methods. Delpit is admittedly not talking about immigrant students, let alone Indian immigrant students, but I would venture to say that the problems that several immigrant minority groups face in the first-year writing classroom are not entirely dissimilar from what Gita and others like her experience. Delpit, along with others like Shor and Seitz, echoes the contradiction that is the focal point here when she sums up the situation of the skilled individual incapable of critical analysis who becomes the trainable, low-level functionary of the dominant 52 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 56 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM society (19). Such trained individuals serve only to reinforce the existing oppressive systems in opposition to a critical thinker who lacks the skills demanded by employers and institutions of higher learning who can only aspire to financial and social status within the disenfranchised underworld (19). For the minority to rise, skills and critical thought must work in tandem. This comes back to the whole point of contextualizing their realties that can only be devised in consultation with the adults who share their culture (45). Though she is referring to students, teachers and parents of color that include those that are not financially as advantaged as others are, I extend this idea to include Gita and others like her. Gita points out that to her family, higher education is the only way to avoiding a financially insecure future and therefore is a financially defined commodity, the most valuable being the medical profession. Most Indian immigrant families prioritize the STEM fields. That is why Gitas choice of a higher education in business studies was a hard sell. Delpit cites John Dewey to underscore the importance of the students context and experience, the greatest asset in the students possessionthe greatest, moreover that will be in his possession [is] his own direct and personal experience (124). Coming in from a teachers perspective, Delpit concludes that a failure to allow students to explore their past experiences in light of the theoretical constructs will only produce a mindless imitation of others practice rather than a reflection on teaching as an interactive process (125). It is no wonder then that Gita is unable to connect with the class topic, even though she does care about the issues being discussed. The class assignment focused on issues of exploitation of womens labor and the natural environment in Third World countries, and one might imagine that this topic would naturally lend itself to an Indian immigrant student. Yet, her inability to engage with this topic underscores the importance of contextualization in the process of bridging this gap. Gita says that she does care about the environment, but cannot relate it to the class she is in. She provides her own contextualization when she specifies environment as being the environment in which women are working, like the factories or BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 57 53 1/22/20 3:10 PM whatever. That environment I do care about, but planting trees or something like that, that had no interest to me (90). She further specifies the one-person audience to whom she is writingRashmi, the writing teacher and what the word environment means to her. Gita is unclear with what Rashmi wants and is therefore disconnected. Delpit widens the scope of resolving this pedagogical and intellectual disconnect because this issue is more relevant today in the multicultural reality that is the American writing classroom. Only by acknowledging and incorporating these multicultural experiences through contextualization can we create a self-sustaining critical framework that will achieve self-realization. It is this self-realization in the Indian immigrant students that will open windows, maybe even make a door in the walls that they are surrounded by. Recommendations It would be erroneous on my part to extend these reflections to include all immigrant teachers and students, even Indian immigrant students, but it is becoming evident to me that this disconnect is seldom confined to any one group of students. It is often a larger problem of contextualizing the students mindset with the delivery mechanisms in the writing classroom. It is when we, as teachers of writing, understand the contexts that accompany the (Indian) immigrant student that we can begin to make some headway in getting these students invested in the process of developing intellectual authority and seeing its inherent value. The gurushishya parambara, or the teacher-taught tradition, and the guru-kula sambradaya, where the student lived with the teacher during the entire duration of their education, is an example of learning that was spontaneous and went beyond the traditional model of institutionalized Western education. This model saw the guru take care of every aspect of the disciplines well-being, while the disciple respects the guru as his father and never disobeys him whatever be the provocation (Kaladharan 209). It may be worth noticing that the relationships are reverential and involve an intimate parent-teacher and child-teacher dynamic within a home-school environment. While replicating such a model as it is in todays context is neither practical nor desirable, the idea 54 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 58 1/22/20 3:10 PM of an education rooted in and supported by the natural environment (Kaladharan 209) that included an understanding of the world of the teacher and student is one that we can take inspiration from. To create a similar environment where the multiple perspectives can intermingle freely, I recommend a process that involves two phases: the first is understanding difference and differences, particularly the factors that define difference for the Indian immigrant student; the second is exploring the value of some nontraditional pedagogical methods that will address these differences and eventually bridge the divide. These are macro perspectives that are presented at a conceptual level so that each instructor can review the situations at hand and modify these ideas to suit their own classroom circumstances. Helping Rashmi Understand Difference and Differences Scholars are increasingly confirming through research that parents play an important role in a childs educational and career decisions and to acknowledge and understand their perspectives is essential if we are to understand the motivations, or lack thereof, in our students. The Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training Report no. 92, shows a direct connection between the kinds of school and career choices a student makes and the opinions of what their parents saw as favorable versus unfavorable choices. As Seitz has demonstrated through the examples of Gita and Rashmi, many Indian immigrant students could come into the writing class with conflicting dual frames of reference. As for Gita, the central voices that create this duality are those of her parents. Parents of Indian immigrant students, much like their Japanese counterparts, are the physical manifestations of the pressures that shape the framework for most Indian immigrant students, and central to understanding this duality is understanding the parents. This is why I believe that any teacher of writing will effectively engage a student only when they begin to try to understand where the student comes from; recognizing and acknowledging the cultural and traditional differences therein; and developing an understanding of difference per se. However, as we understand them BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 59 55 1/22/20 3:10 PM as embodiments of this cultural reality, we must be careful not to fetishize these differences making them fixed, immovable categories. The United States has the largest number of immigrants in the world, and the population of immigrant children has rapidly grown. Marcelo Suarez-Orozco and Carola Suarez-Orozco outline the growth of the immigrant population in the US, In 1970, the population of immigrant origin stood at 6% of the total population of children. It reached 20% by 2000 and is projected to be 33% by 2015 (9). All of these children, Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco further point out, are born from foreign-born parents (9). This is consequently an era of hyper diversity and is evident in, for example, their levels of education. On the one hand these immigrant parents are among the most educated people comprising 47% of scientists with doctorates, a quarter of all physicians, and 24% of engineers . . . 41% of newly arrived immigrants had at least a bachelors degree (Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco, 10). On the other hand, they make up the lower levels of education and must find jobs as lowskilled workers in agriculture, service industries, and construction (Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco, 10). Suarez-Orozco and SuarezOrozco claim that in 2013, 28% of all recent arrivals lived in poverty, and this percentage had grown from 18% in 1970 (10). I propose that understanding the immigrant parents of these students from a realistic and non-prejudiced perspective will explain the motivations of the students more holistically. This is my intent in the methods I outline further on. Yan Guo points out that transcultural knowledge construction whereby these immigrants change themselves by integrating into the new system of their newly adopted homeland can manifest in two ways: opposition and discrimination, or to cultural creativity and the integration of new knowledge within academic and societal positionings (123). The inability to understand immigrant parents in turn is attributed to either misconceptions of difference or a lack of knowledge about their culture (Guo 123). Guo demonstrates through interviews that this transcultural knowledge construction is the blend of what the immigrant parents bring with them and what they experience here. This is the dual frames of reference that 56 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 60 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM they knowingly and unknowingly pass onto their children (126). Guo urges all teachers to acknowledge this rapidly changing social context and better address the needs of students from a multicultural, multilingual population. Guo and Mohan (2008) suggest that educators and administrators need to recognize that educational tasks may be given culturally divergent interpretations (134). Guo concludes by arguing that teachers and schools in general need to learn immigrant parents views on education and cultural differences on home-school communities (137) to begin understanding the students in their classrooms and schools. Acknowledging differences is part of what a teacher must do, particularly when looking at students who fall outside of the mainstream. Yet it is important to realize that differences that are rooted in tradition and culture are often seen as unchanging while they are systems that blend and shift in response to pressures from the environment and the ingenuity of those who belong to such groups (Kerschbaum, 617). The challenges are immense as they are real, as Stephanie Kerschbaum notes that using discourses about difference to attend simultaneously to broad groups characteristics and to instability within (traditionally defined) categories makes writing teachers, particularly the new ones, anxious (617). To address this Kerschbaum suggests that this scholarship on difference can be approached in primarily two ways: by becoming more aware of differences that have received little attention and by developing new insights on familiar differences (618). This fixing difference as Kerschbaum terms it, is the process of treating difference as a stable thing that can be identified and fixed in place, what I call Difference, as well as the attempts to fix, that is improve, the way difference is understood (619). This can happen when the teacher enters the world of the student and the students world enters the writing classroom. In Course X, Leonard Greenbaum and Rudolf Schmerl focus on the ecology of the university system and the first-year writing classroom addressing both student and teachers often indistinguishably. At the core of that analysis, however, are the economic and intellectual expenses that such dictated choices mean when imposed on the students, a conflict I referred to previously. BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 61 57 1/22/20 3:10 PM Greenbaum and Schmerl also manage to bring teacher and student into the world of the other and thereby address some real-time problems that define the world of the first-year writing classes. Using Non-Traditional Assignments to Reconnect Gita and Rashmi Bringing each into the world of the other is a phenomenon that Eileen Lagman examines as part of a larger study on the loss in transnational literacies and brain drain in the narratives of her research informants. She points towards a trend in recent scholarship that has begun to look increasingly at immigrant and migrant communities and the effects of globalization on literacy practices (27). According to Lagman, such scholarship highlights the varied and multiple literacies that are a part of the transnational experience, specifically the new literacies they bring. She writes, the multiple literacies, whether it is through acquiring digital skills, speaking across languages, or mixing languages, they have multiple social and cognitive positions, because of the transnational ties they maintain, from which they can make meaning (27). However, she is quick to also point out that this focus of scholarship on these new and multiple literacies is an effort to counter the narrative that immigrants are lacking, particularly English language skills or official school-based literacies (28). These unconventional, multimodal methods become a means to bridge this divide because first, as they are a part of a larger transnational experience through which universal meaning may be made; and second, these multimodal methods transcend problems that those who are not from the mainstream (like the Indian immigrant students) may otherwise face. The reason for this, says Lagman, is that educators see immigrant students as either unwilling to participate or unable to assimilate. The way to consider all these multiple literacies, Lagman suggests, is through the virtual nationhood, which is the transnational connections made possible by computers and mobile phones to simulate a nation across borders (46). Integrating computers and digital technologies into the process of composition can bring the worlds of the Indian immigrant student into the world of the classroom, and vice versa. The use of already 58 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 62 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM popular digital technologies in the composition class work has great potential in engaging students irrespective of their differences. Daniel Anderson advocates the use of basic computer technologies that are both accessible and affordable in the composition classroom, so that the environment can be reconfigured as construction sites or studio spaces (42). Anderson believes that this in turn will serve as a catalyst for instructors wishing to reconceptualize pedagogies that will jumps start innovation, innovations that instructors have found to yield pedagogical insights and theorizing that can be layered over practice through reflection; such pedagogy in turn facilitates creativity, motivation, and engagement (44). Of the many advantages that Anderson presents, I would point to the hands-on time in class for students to work together as they develop technical skills and multiple literacies (58). Collaboration between teacher, student, and the space of critical thinking present a very viable and sustainable pedagogical tool to fix difference, which Kerschbaum suggests is the first step to understanding and gaining from (multiple) cultural differences (619). Joyojeet Pal, et al. looked at the value of computer-aided learning in the minds of the Indian parents in India. They found that a computer (based) literacy held immense value because the parents believed that computer-based literacies positively impacted their childs interest in school as well as the status of the school in the eyes of the community at large (2). Their research was not on an immigrant population, but their findings hold value here because their final takeaway argued for including parents in the planning and implementation of educational projects and saw this practice as indispensable (8). Traditionally and culturally, the importance and presence of the Indian parent in the lives of their children is tantamount to devotional reverence. For the Indian immigrant student walking the path between Indian roots and an American life and reality, this parental presence is unaltered by the fact of their physical location. The inclusion of digital technology looks at the shifting interests of the students as a means of engagement, but it does not address the question of content that would enable fixing difference. To look at content, I propose that the teacher take the class and classroom BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 63 59 1/22/20 3:10 PM outside of the purview of the conventions of the traditional writing class and into the realm of multimodal composition assignments. Multimodality in composition is both a recent concept as well as an old one (Palmeri). In Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing, Jason Palmeri repeatedly stresses the need to acknowledge and incorporate multimodality in composition studies if teachers are to stay relevant and engage their students in a meaningful way. Selfe calls for an acknowledgement of non-alphabetic composition across digital and print formats; Lunsford sees writing today as having moved from print conventions to writing that goes beyond the black marks on white paper; and Yancy holds the writing teacher responsible for fulfilling the students need for multiple literacies (qtd. In Palmeri 4-5). Palmeri sums up this common refrain succinctly when he writes, alphabetic literacy is our past; multimodal composing is our future (5). By looking at multimodality as a guiding idea on how to conceptualize a writing course and looking at multimedia, which includes all the multiple forms of technologies that enable such expression, fixing differences might be successfully accomplished in the writing classroom. To this end I recommend two models of assignments that can be easily incorporated in all kinds of writing classes and in varying degrees depending upon the discretion of the teacher: the incorporation of multimodal assignments, and the development of assignments that ethnographically engage the community. These assignment models will address the problems of connection and motivation, as well as contextualize the two worlds of the student. These models will consider the families from which these students come; they will look at difference (or lack thereof) as a stable thing as well as something that must be understood within a larger context. The students will see that in several ways their cultural differences fade away in the glare of a new technological reality that defines all students uniformly. They will also be able to understand and explain the two contrasting worlds they inhabit to themselves, their parents, their peers, and their teachers. The effectiveness of moving outside of convention in engaging the students is not something new (Palmeri). Authors of composition 60 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 64 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM studies first multimodal composition textbooks like Helen Hutchinson (Mixed Bag, 1970), William Sparke and Clark Mckowen (Montage, 1970), Kytle (Comp Box, 1972), James Miller (Rhetoric of the Imagination, 1972), to name a few, all argue that the composing process can only happen when the student is motivated, their imagination excited, and the course contextualized to their world beyond the writing classrooms. Hutchinson states the underlying assumption is that involvement precedes thought, and thought precedes writing. This to me is the underlying assumption of all writing, and it is nowhere more critical than in the first-year writing classroom, which is the beginning of the path where writing and critical thought are indistinguishably intertwined. The first model I present is adapted from the multimodal assignments outlined by Palmeri in Remixing Composition, and the second comes from Shirley Brice Heaths integration of ethnography into the writing classroom as seen in Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Community Classrooms. Both of these can be used in isolation, but they can be used as effectively when combined. In Remixing Composition, Palmeri makes a case for the use of nontextual modes of first-year writing pedagogy that are both interdisciplinary as well as multimodal and employ a host of mediums digital as well as sensory. Of his take-aways, the most significant in this context is the connections between the composing process across disciplines and mediums, which he demonstrates as having some inherently underlying, almost universal similarities. Palmeri uses studies that range from Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi who draw similarities between successful artists and expert writers, to Shipka who offer[s] students more open-ended assignments in which they must actively choose which multimodality . . . they will employ to convey an argument (qtd. In Palmeri 47). As Palmeri examines these various ideas on how a composition class can become multimodal yet remain true to composition studies in concept, he finds that students really enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity to move beyond the alphabetic (2). In terms of how these assignments can be employed towards fixing difference, each of his ideas lends themselves naturally to understanding difference BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 65 61 1/22/20 3:10 PM at several levels. For instance, Palmeri looks at the role of voice and how its various manifestations can be employed in creating a critical and creative awareness in the student. Through examining how voice, Rhetoric, dialogue, and dialect work in the composing process, Palmeri does two things: he demonstrates how the creation and transference of the written and the spoken language are both deeply interconnected social activities; and he gives us a means through which we can begin to understand the multiple voices in our classroom. By getting the students to record their voices and use these dialogues to fine tune their writing, we can understand the differences therein as well as understand difference from a whole new perspective outside of just their writing. Another idea is the use of audio-visual electronic media in the classroom to begin the process of composing outside of the alphabetic text. While this is a blend of Anderson and Palmeri, Palmeri spells out many ideas in his monograph on how such assignments can be designed and the technologies needed to do this. Technology has redefined categories in ways that have significantly challenged older categorizations, particularly for the students. By resorting to communicating in a language, albeit a digital one that is non-alphabetic, a teacher of composition can begin to connect with students on their own turf as it were. Heaths study looked at various factors that defined and determined the language learning abilities in young children from the two communities of Roadville and Trackton. Heath defines the project as being primarily focusing on the face-to-face network in which each child learns the ways of acting, believing, and valuing of those about him. For the children of Roadville and Trackton, their primary community is geographically and socially their immediate neighborhood (6). In the course of her book, what is most significant in this context is not just the direct connection that she makes with language learning abilities and the role of immediate social context surrounding the child, but in the way in which she redefines the role of the teacher and the student in the assignment section of Ways with Words. As she defines a possible ethnographic project that has the students go out into the community and base their research outside of traditional classroom and textbooks, she labels the roles of the 62 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 66 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM teacher and the students differently. She calls the teachers learners, and she labels the students ethnographers. By calling the teachers learners, Heath is fixing difference as the teachers approach understanding difference from multiple perspectives. By calling the students ethnographers, she is giving students agency as well as a reason to invest in the assignment. In this way, Heath demonstrates how ethnography, or at the very least, ethnographically inspired assignments can take the entire class through fixing difference with the final aim being connection between writing student and critical composition. Taking inspiration from the ethnographic projects that Shirley Brice Heath outlines in Ways with Words is the basis for the second model I put forward. One of the main ways in which we can understand and connect with immigrant students is to acknowledge and understand the worlds from which they come. A big part of this world is one that has their parents and the society that surrounds every individual household within that cultural universe, irrespective of its geographic location. This world is often far more real for an immigrant student than the writing classroom, grades and all. Ethnographic assignments as inspired by Heaths work will have students going out into their own worlds to critically analyze the realties from which they come and must return. This could find them engaged in the course material because it connects to their real life outside of the classroom in a meaningful way, but it could also result in their reviewing their multiple frames of reference with an intellectual authority that benefits them and their communities at large. They will begin to see that their worlds are not disconnected either in content or aim and can articulate this reflection to themselves and those around them. In the context of student experiences in the American high school, Jennifer McCloud argues that in order to understand their experiences in the ESL classrooms, she began to take all of their experiences and values into consideration, which in turn presented new paradigms for understanding human experiences (263). BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 67 63 1/22/20 3:10 PM Conclusion The observations in this study are informed by firsthand experiences as an Indian immigrant composition student (Gita), teacher (Rashmi) and scholar (myself), and the recommendations I present also come from those multiple positionalities. The problem of getting the Gitas and Rashmis to connect across this intellectual divide must involve understanding the world from which such students come and understanding their parents who embody their larger realities. The recommendations aim to fulfill both these requirements: they aim to understand the different forces that define the educational experience for Indian immigrant students in the composition classroom through the students themselves. These multimodal, nontraditional methods that I present are conceptually outlined because designing writing assignments is, in my opinion, the privilege of the writing teacher and the students. I would argue that there is no one-planfits-all course plan in composition studies. In my own experience, each semester and each class is as unique as a thumb-print and each semester is customized to suit the students there. True, the course plans are based on a wide framework that contains the goals and routes forward, but the specifics shift based on where the class is and what the class needs. The uniqueness of each composition class negates any attempt to establish and present detailed course designs because specific context must be the main guide in crafting the dayto-day plans. Finally, we must remember that this classroom includes students other than the Indian immigrant students and their interests are as important as any other groups interests. At the end of it all, it is the teachers and students in a writing class who will know what works best for them. In closing, I urge all the Rashmis out there to acknowledge that this disconnect is a problem that is real but fixable; I urge all the Gitas to give themselves a chance to enhance their individual and their professional value by inculcating individual authority that can only come from engaging in a critically oriented writing class; and finally I urge all scholars and practitioners to think about this problem and share their observations, experiences and ideas. It is only by 64 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 68 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM collective recognition of this disconnect and collaboration to resolve it that we can eventually bridge this great divide. Works Cited Anderson, Daniel. The Low Bridge to High Benefits: Entry-Level Multimedia, Literacies, and Motivation. Computers and Composition, vol. 25, 2008, pp. 40-60, www.sciencedirect.com. Accessed 13 June 2018. Belcher, Diana D. English for Specific Purposes: Teaching to Perceived Needs and Imagined Futures in Worlds of Work, Study, and Everyday Life. TESOL Quarterly, vol. 40, no.1, 2006, pp. 133-56, JSTOR, www.jstor.org. ezproxy.lib.uh.edu/stable/40264514. Accessed 23 Oct. 2018. Connors, Robert J. The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse. College Composition and Communication, vol. 32, no. 4, 1981, pp. 444-55. ---. Shaping Tools. Composition - Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy, UP Pittsburg, 1997, pp. 69-111. Delpit, Lisa. Other Peoples Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. The New Press, 2006. Eveland, Sabrina. Stable, Practical, and High-Paying: How Second Generation Indian/Pakistani Adults are Affected by Parental Pressure in Their Career Choices. SIT Digital Collections, Capstone Collection, 2012, digitalcollections.sit.edu/capstones/2558/. Accessed 30 Mar. 2018. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury, 1970. Greenbaum, Leonard A., and Rudolf Schmerl. Course X: A Left Field Guide to Freshman English. J. B. Lippincott Company, 1970. Guo, Yan. Diversity in Public Education: Acknowledging Immigrant Parent Knowledge. Canadian Journal of Education, vol. 35, no.2, 2012, pp. 120140, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/canajeducrevucan.35.2.120. Accessed 25 Oct. 2018. Hale, Michael. Teaching the Immigrant Debate in Freshman Composition. The Radical Teacher, no. 84: Teaching and Immigration, Spring 2009, pp.1830. Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Works in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge Press, 1996. Horner, Brice, Samantha NeCamp, and Christian Donahue. Toward a Multilingual Composition Scholarship: From English Only to a Translingual Norm. College, Composition and Communication, vol. 63, no.2, 2011, 269-300, JSTOR, www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib.uh. edu/stable/23131585. Accessed 24 Oct. 2018. Hutchinson, Helen. Mixed Bag: Artifacts from Contemporary Culture. Scott, Forman and Company, 1970. BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 69 65 1/22/20 3:10 PM Kaladharan, V. From Meditative Learning to Impersonal Pedagogy: Reflections of Transformation of the Indian Gurukula. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 20, no.1, 2011, pp. 207-18, JSTOR, www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib.uh.edu/stable/10.5250/quiparle.20.1.0207. Accessed 24 Feb. 2015. Kerschbaum, Stephanie L. Avoiding the Difference Fixation: Identity Categories, Markers of Difference, and the Teaching of Writing. College Composition and Communication, vol. 63, no. 4, 2012, pp. 616-44, JSTOR, www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib.uh.edu/stable/23264231. Accessed 25 Oct. 2018. Lagman, Eileen. Literacy Remains: Loss and Affects in Transnational Literacies. College English, vol. 81, no. 1, 2018, pp. 27-49. McCloud, Jennifer. Just Like Me: How Immigrant Students Experience a U.S. High School. The High School Journal, vol. 98, no. 3, 2015, pp. 26282. Miller, Jr., James E. Word, Self, Reality: The Rhetoric of Imagination. Dodd, Mead & Company, 1972. Palmeri, Jason. Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy. Southern Illinois UP, 2012. ---. Multimodality and Composition Studies, 1960-Present. 2007. Ohio State University, PhD dissertation. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Pal, Joyojeet, Meera Lakshmanan, and Kentaro Toyama. My Child Will Be Respected: Parental Perspectives on Computers in Rural India. International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, Bangalore, India, 2007, pp. 1-9. Ruecker, Todd, Stefan Fraizier, and Mariya Tseptsura. Language Difference Can Be an Asset: Exploring the Experiences of Nonnative English-Speaking Teachers of Writing. College Composition and Communication, vol. 69, no. 4, 2018, pp. 612-41. Seitz, David. Who Can Afford Critical Consciousness?: Practicing a Pedagogy of Humility. Hampton Press, 2004. Shor, Ira. Critical Teaching and Everyday Life. University of Chicago Press, 1987. ---. When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy. University of Chicago, 1996. Sparke, William, and Clark McKowen. Montage: Investigations in Language. Collier-Macmillan Limited, 1970. Suarez-Orozco, Marcelo M., and Carola Suarez-Orozco. Children of Immigration. The Phi Delta Kappan, vol. 97, no. 4, 2016, pp. 8-14, JSTOR, www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib.uh.edu/stable/24579534. Accessed 23 Oct. 2018. 66 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 70 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM MAKING MEANING: EFFECTIVE AND PRACTICAL REVISION INSTRUCTION Brandie Bohney Guest Editor Bowling Green State University When I was teaching ninth-grade English, I had a bulletin board dedicated to revision. It took up the whole back wall of my classroom and had multiple drafts of four different genres: a reading response for a graduate course, a blog post about sports, the first chapter of a YA novel, and the lede for a newspaper story about education. My hope was that by providing concrete examples of the significant changes in real writing from first draft to final draft, students would begin to understand that revision is not a punishment or evidence of incompetence, but just the opposite: revision is an opportunity and evidence of writing prowess. Students frequently interpret significant revision elimination or addition of content, essay reorganization, development of new ideas or evidenceas unnecessary added work, if they consider it at all (Sommers). They often think, I already wrote the paper; I dont want to re-write the paper! or perceive copy-editing as revision. It is challenging to coax students away from their one-anddone assumptions about writing processesespecially in an educational environment that focuses on timed essaysbut it is critical to their development as writers. Our contributors to this issues Teacher to Teacher column tackle this tricky issue: pushing students to revise for improved meaning rather than merely proofreading for correctness. First, Katie Nagrotsky walks us through an imitation exercise and student-driven mentor text collection developed out of her JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 71 VOLUME 34.2 1/22/20 3:10 PM desire to shift students from answer-getting to problem-solving thinking during writing workshops. Although imitation has a rich history in rhetorical instruction (Abbott, Marrou), its usefulness in the classroom is sometimes overshadowed by concerns that it may be too formulaic or traditional to be effective (Butler). But in Beyond Is This Good?: Rethinking Revision to Forge a Community of Writers, Nagrotsky capitalizes on the creative affordances of imitation and solves an issue of students looking to her for answers about their writing. Anna Daley then explores six common problems of the studentwriter revision process that stand in the way of meaningful revision in her piece, Playing with a Healthy Revision Process in the Classroom. Daley considers issues such as feedback and student commitment to their writing, and throughout her practical approaches to all the issues she focuses on shifting student thinking from always proofreading for correctness to first revising for meaning. In Show Them How: Revision in the High School Classroom, Paula Uriarte looks to the ubiquitous but often-criticized practice of peer review as a site for developing strong revision skills in student writers. Paulson, Alexander, and Armstrong have noted the importance of explicitly teaching peer review skills in order to encourage meaningful feedback among student review groups, and Uriartes article explicates a means for doing just that. Her approach focuses on high school students but could be adapted for students of nearly any age group. Finally, Mark Latta takes a creative approach in pushing students to resee their own and each others work in Blackout Revision: A Strategy for Playful De/Construction of Student Drafts. Using the popular model of blackout poetry, Latta suggests a peer review exercise that has students blacking out one anothers texts as a means of close reading and interpretation. This unusual strategy challenges students to seek out core concepts and meaning in an unexpected but powerful way. 68 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 72 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM Works Cited Abbott, D. P. Rhetoric and Writing in the Renaissance. A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Modern America, 2nd ed., J. J. Murphy (Ed.), Hermagoras Press, 2001, pp. 145-72. Butler, Paul. Imitation as Freedom: (Re)forming Student Writing. The Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 2, 2002, pp. 25-32. Retrieved from www.nwp. org/cs/public/print/resource/361. Marrou, H. I. A History of Education in Antiquity. University of Wisconsin Press, 1956. Paulson, Eric J., Jonathan Alexander, and Sonya Paulson. Peer Review ReViewed: Investigating the Juxtaposition of Composition Students Eye Movements and Peer-Review Processes. Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 41, no. 3, Feb. 2007, pp. 304-35. Sommers, Nancy. Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. NCTE, 2011, pp. 43-54. MAKING MEANING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 73 69 1/22/20 3:10 PM 70 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 74 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM Beyond Is This Good?: Rethinking Revision to Forge a Community Katie Nagrotsky I dont know what to do. Can you see if this is good? Leah (all names are pseudonyms) made her way across the classroom to the conference table. Her eyes were desperate. I was about to respond when another student appeared with her notebook. Me too. Can you check this, Rebecca begged. Leah and Rebeccas requests unsettled the fragile focus of the workshop. I could feel it. I have always believed in the power of conferring with students, but this was different. In the first few weeks of school I realized that independent writing time could all too quickly devolve into a deli line, with students dependently waiting for me to review their writing. Somewhere along the way, my sixth-grade students had come to see writing as arriving at an answer. They were not used to generating their own ideas. They expected me to tell them what to write and perceived writing conferences as an opportunity to have their work checked. In what follows, I will describe two structures I tried that helped to reframe students attitudes towards writing as a recursive problemsolving process (Rief 31) and push us towards real revision. Mining the Relationship between Talk and Writing The first thing I did was try to help students see that they could grow and change their ideas through talk. There was a connection, I realized, between the dependency in writers workshop and the popcorn conversations I kept hearing in book clubs. In these conversations a student would raise a question and instead of responding to that idea, another student would jump right to another topic entirely. These conversations quickly lost all dialogic quality and quickly became a chorus of disparate voices. I had to change my teaching if students were going to learn how to hear one another and extend and revise their thinking in the MAKING MEANING 71 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 75 1/22/20 3:10 PM company of others (Santman 21). To help facilitate this rhythm, I asked students to pause after each of their book club meetings. This quickwrite reflection allowed them to consider how further reading, watching, or listening confirmed or added to their original thinking: What did you hear during the conversation? What are you thinking now? How did what you heard add to, change, or confirm your thinking? A few students resisted this kind of thinking and reflection. After sharing an initial idea, they did not focus much on what other classmates said or how what was being said connected to or talked back to their own ideas. I wasnt trying to force students to change their minds, but I did expect that they listened closely to one another. If they were learning to be open to the concept of talking to grow and change ideas, then they might eventually start to see how writing was thinking and that revision was part of the iterative process of developing ideas. These quickwrites helped build the foundation for writing as thinking and essay as a journey of thought (Bomer 178). I modeled how my own thinking evolved multiple times, and eventually I started to see a difference. Students were starting to talk to one another instead of at one another. Using Mentor Texts to Fuel Revision As the unit drew to a close, students began pulling from notebook entries to develop an idea into an essay. Once they had a draft, I decided to encourage revision in a new way. I gathered a group of students who were struggling with their introductions for a small group lesson on using mentor texts to guide their revision. I handed them the first paragraph of an essay that we had read as a class. After I read the introduction aloud to refresh their memory, I asked them to imitate the writing but with their own book club book character in mind. 72 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 76 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM They took a few minutes to write out an imitation of the mentor paragraph on small white boards (see Figure 1). Suddenly, they all had richly descriptive paragraphs about their characters. As they went back to their essay drafts, I suggested that they read aloud to a partner to see if this new writing meshed with what theyd already written. If it didnt match yetmore revision. Sometimes you have to add a new piece or stimulus to resee a draft and write into it from another angle. I started a binder full of mentor texts so students could use them as models for improving their own drafts. Figure 1: Michaels Imitation But my best teaching ideas always come from students. One day during independent writing time, Natalie called me over. I made another mentor text binder, she exclaimed. She showed me the cover page (see Figure 2) and opened the binder. She had imitated my directions, instructing her classmates to add to the collection with a poem, and asking them to write a short note about what they loved about what the writer did. She had added Thumbprint, a poem by Eve Merriam that we had read a few weeks ago. Why hadnt I thought of this? Natalies idea took off. Students started bringing in texts to add to her binder. By the spring, we had a library of six full binders full MAKING MEANING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 77 73 1/22/20 3:10 PM Figure 2: Natalies Poetry Mentor Text Binder of poems, articles, and short stories. I taught a few minilessons where we practiced writing off a line or borrowing the writers idea or structure. After imitating some of the shortest pieces, students seemed more comfortable seeing these authors as guides. They often grabbed a piece out a binder for inspiration when they had writers block or revision block. As Marchetti and ODell note, mentor texts can inspire students and teach them how to write . . . 74 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 78 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM mentor texts enable independence (3). As a school we moved to Google classroom, and students posted mentor texts online so that they had a bank of mentor texts to access from home. There were still some moments of frustration because writing and revising is difficult and messy work. But the deli line almost completely disappeared. Eventually, my students stopped following me around the room for help getting an idea and started consulting the mentor texts and one another when they wanted to figure out a way forward in their writing. Works Cited Bomer, Randy. Time for Meaning: Crafting Literate Lives in Middle and High School. Heinemann, 1995. Gratz, Alan. Its On Like Donkey Kong. Breakfast on Mars and 37 Other Delectable Essays, edited by Rebecca Stern and Brad Wolfe, Roaring Brook Press, 2013, pp. 24-25. Marchetti, Allison, and Rebekah O'Dell. Writing with Mentors: How to Reach Every Writer in the Room Using Current, Engaging Mentor Texts. Heinemann, 2015. Rief, Linda. Whats Next in Writing Must Be What Was in Writing. Voices from the Middle, vol. 26, no. 4, 2019, pp. 31-34. Santman, Donna. Shades of Meaning: Comprehension and Interpretation in Middle School. Heinemann, 2005. MAKING MEANING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 79 75 1/22/20 3:10 PM Playing a Healthy Revision Process in the Classroom Anna Daley Those of us who teach writing to young people are intensely familiar with the struggles students experience in our classes. But we also know the transformative power of writing, of re-examining what we think and communicating that thinking to others, and of owning our stories and using our voices. So how do we apprentice our students to move beyond the one and done routine of cranking out a first draft, editing it, and turning it in? How do we cultivate a rich practice of process-oriented writing, with students returning to their writing to dig into their meaning, reorganizing purposefully and editing for effect, not just correctness? Although I currently teach dual credit, college composition to seniors, Ive used the following strategies with grades 9 through 12. First, a necessary preface: we cannot induct students into a rich thinking and writing process if they do not feel safe and respected. Creating the classroom culture may be a topic for another time, but without this context, many students will find it next to impossible to write meaningfully, a condition of a healthy revision process. Here are common problems I face after students have a first or second draft, and the solutions Ive developed in response. The Problem: Students cant break out of the formula because the formula is easy, reliable, and they just dont know other ways to compose. My Classroom Solution: Schedule for a hearty revision process in your lesson plans. I used to plan for about three days of revision during this time in my career, revision was something students did as a homework assignment. But I quickly realized that without rich feedback and suggestions, students didnt know what to do besides edit and use the thesaurus. Now, I allot roughly two weeks of lesson plans for every writing project for students to re-see, re-think, and revise. 76 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 80 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM During these two weeks, we conduct writing workshops in class. I can monitor the feedback they are giving to each other and add my own suggestions. Students still revise at home as a homework assignment, but they have helpful feedback to take home with them which leads to global revisions as opposed to the editing I used to see. The Problem: How do we keep revision or workshop activities fresh and useful while teaching students how to develop helpful feedback for each other? My Classroom Solution: Ive developed a variety of activities that fall under two major types of workshops. Working Workshops guide students to re-see, re-think, dive deeper into, develop, flesh out, analyze, re-organize, or try a new approach. Students operate on their own draft right there during class time, developing their writing as Im giving them step by step instructions. It feels a lot like coaching. I have Working Workshops that help students develop content, try different ways of organizing that content, and play with local language revisions. One such workshop is called Explode a Moment. Students have an early draft on their table; I coach them to find a single moment in their writing that most illustrates the point they are trying to make. Once theyve identified this spot in their draft, we conduct a five-minute quickwrite to develop sensory details, add internal monologue, dialogue and other fiction techniques. These details slow down the pace, much like when the camera zooms in on a scene in a movie, which tips readers off that this moment is important. Its a great strategy when students are blending narrative with arguments or when they are trying an implied or delayed thesis. Feedback Workshops are guided group protocol designed to help students develop useful feedback for each other. These workshops ask students to read each others work, talk about each paper as a group, develop written feedback (so the student author can use it at home) and prioritize that feedback. We prioritize global issues (developing a topic, content, and organizational structure) before local issues (spelling, grammar, and local language issues like syntax, word MAKING MEANING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 81 77 1/22/20 3:10 PM choice, etc). This is not to say that global issues are more important, but I believe global writing issues are a prerequisite to improving local issues. One Feedback Workshop Ive developed asks writers (operating on an early draft) to identify three lists: What I Know about my draft, What I Dont Know about my draft, and My Specific Point of Feedback. Students list all the things they already know (I know my intro paragraph is no good, I know I need to add more evidence, etc.), what they dont know (I know how to hook a reader into the essay, I know if my point is clear, etc.) and their specific feedback request (I need ideas to engage my reader and keep them engaged). Ive used ideas from Bruce Ballenger, Barry Lane, Jeffrey Wilhelm, Michael Smith, William Zinsser, to name a few, as well as the brilliant public school teachers Ive had the honor of collaborating with in developing these revision activities and workshop protocol. Ive developed my own protocol when I see a specific need. Some of the protocol are similar in purpose or in nature, but its important to keep things fresh for students and offer them many processes to figure out what works best for them. By the time they are conducting workshops for the final portfolio, students choose which workshop protocol will work best for their needs. The Problem: Writing is an inherently creative process and that is hard to grade. My Classroom Solution: Find an appropriate balance between rewarding effort (participating in the process) and providing realistic, objective assessments of the qualities in their writing. Both are crucial. Students cant get in the game if every step, every draft, every workshop is graded for quality. Like any other creative endeavor, it has to be fun and safe to try. For example, I took a week-long music camp this summer as a novice mandolin player. If my teacher had corrected every mistake or pointed out each of my deficiencies, I would have wanted to quit. I might get the idea fixed in my head that Im just not a musician. It certainly would hurt my growth mindset and stunt my learning process. 78 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 82 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM Playing with writing is crucial, so be sure to reward students plenty for just getting in the game. On the other hand, students deserve to have enough objective feedback leading up to a summative performance that they are not surprised by their grade. I will often give students full points for, say, a fourth draft if its complete and they can show me the changes they made from the third draft. In addition to the grade that goes in the gradebook, I might also mark a score on a 5-point scale, giving writers some targeted feedback on a particular skill we are developing in this unit. I teach college composition to seniors; I weight classwork and participation in revision activities (completion grades) 50% because I know if they get in the game and participate, they will grow as writers; the summative writing portfolio is weighted 50% and is graded objectively against my learning objectives and standards. The Problem: It feels like there is not enough time in the day to provide feedback to individual students. My Classroom Solution: Individual feedback is a key practice to assist students in their development as thinkers and writers. Provide specific, individual feedback to every student early in the year, particularly as you are training the class to develop the language to talk about writing, an eye to spot good ideas and beautiful language, and the tools to couch their critiques gently and helpfully. Dont feel obligated to comment on every paper throughout the year, though. We should gradually release responsibility to them. I give students options in their feedback, which cuts down on my time. For example, I let students choose between comments on Google Doc, comments in a letter, a personal conference, or a 3x5 card. Some students just want the 3x5 card because its limited and straightforward. During those weeks of workshops, keep track of which tables you sit at each day so you can at least see every students project and provide feedback in person; be sure to check in on the quality of the workshop group, and monitor and adjust as needed. Later in the school year, release responsibility to students to provide feedback. Try to avoid only providing rubric feedback or group feedback. Students are individuals and deserve to be treated as such. MAKING MEANING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 83 79 1/22/20 3:10 PM The Problem: Students dont want to risk being critiqued for something they care about, so they write about things they dont actually care about. My Classroom Solution: Set the right conditions for a creative process. Community building early and regularly is essential because you will be asking students to open up, be vulnerable, show their crappy first drafts to each other and give and receive feedback. This requires a safe environment that supports risk taking. Build writing groups, preferably at tables shared by 3-5 students rather than at individual desks. Groups should shuffle regularly but not randomly; I always allow students to choose their first group of the year and I give students some measure of choice in who they are with or who they need to avoid. Students need to feel safe to write meaningfully, and every educator should understand how motivating choice is for students. Emphasize what professional writer Anne Lamott calls a shitty rough draft, what many teachers call quickwrites, freewrites, or completion assignments. Allow students to take the pressure off a first (or second or third) draft having to be correct or even immediately receive feedback. Let them write their way into things. In other words, reward effort. I give my students full points for completed assignments in my instructional sequences so they feel they can take risks, try a new approach, explore a tangent, or get ideas down without having to wonder if their teacher thinks those ideas or attempts are correct. Ask student groups to read each others writing and name what is working. At the end of that small group reading, ask every group to nominate up a composition from their table that was interesting, different, beautiful or provocative. Invite a few nominees to share their writing and then invite the group to name what they appreciated about the composition. This process cultivates the habit of noticing and naming what works in writing, builds confidence in young writers, cultivates a positive classroom community, all while apprenticing students in discussion about writing. 80 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 84 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM The Problem: Students just dont care about their writing. My Classroom Solution: When we find that our students are producing writing they really dont care about, then we know they are writing toward a product (a paper that will receive a good grade) rather than a process of developing meaningful ideas. Teach through inquiry pedagogy. Frame instructional units and individual lessons with open ended essential questions that invite students into the unit of study. My first unit essential question is Who are you as a thinker or writer? This question often prompts students to consider how often they have written for a grade, or written things they dont really think in a timed-write setting. This unit also helps students consider the type of writing that is most often honored in schools (short fast thinking) and the ways in which they fit or dont fit that model. Guide and assist students in developing their topic, substance, and form. Gradually release responsibility to students along the way. End the unit with a culminating writing project in which students develop their own response to the framing question (or address some aspect that fits under the Essential Question). Using inquiry methods also means that we assist students in developing ideas that they care about. Lets be honest, timed writes and formula writing have taught a generation of students that their first idea is the only idea to pursue. My students really struggle with developing original ideas that they care about. But I know how painful it will be when they are revising an essay they dont really care about for the 6th time. Help them develop ideas through group discussion, group brainstorming, and plenty of freewriting. I use a process I call the hotseat, in which each student names the topic they are thinking of writing about in a whole class discussion. I can coach them on their topics right then and there; additionally, every other student is able to hear dozens of example topics. I encourage them to shamelessly steal good ideas that resonate as true for them. Remind students often that the most important thing they can do to improve their writing is to write what they care about, no matter whether the writing task is personal or academic. MAKING MEANING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 85 81 1/22/20 3:10 PM Show Them How: Peer Review as Part of Process Paula Uriarte The writing process is often taught as linear because there are so many students in a high school classroom. It is easier to lockstep through together than to acknowledge that each students process is unique and often messy. In Idaho, we even had a multiple choice question on one of our standardized state assessments that asked what the steps of the writing process werein order. Traditional approaches to writing instruction as a process that looks something like assign a writing project, return to the student with comments, and then ask students to revise by a deadline eliminates the very powerful learning that can happen in peer review. Introducing peer review requires a teacher to slow down and make process explicit for students. In my classroom, we spend a lot of writing time thinking through ideas in a variety of ways. For example, this might be a structured and timed freewrite or brainstorm that leads students to discover what they want to say. Theres also time for talksharing with a partner or conferencing quickly with me, whether at my desk individually while the class is working on something or as I move table to table and talk informally with small groups. Students might pitch ideas before beginning a draft to me or to the class. Just these small steps in the beginning help students see the malleability of ideas and how things might change as we talk or think more, and how to trust talk as part of the process. Once students have ideas, we move to drafting and a fixed date to bring a draft to class to share with their writing groups. These groups are crucial to success and I usually choose them. Before students ever look at each others drafts, we do some team building and create commitments (I will bring my draft to class on time; I will be open to suggestions) so they begin to feel comfortable with each other. They may spend part of a class period playing a get to know you game, or they may participate in a conversation starter activity not at all related to writing. 82 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 86 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM An important part of the peer review process is helping students know HOW to respond to each others work. Like any other skill, this one needs to be taught explicitly if students are to become helpful partners to each other. Before our first draft deadline, I ask for one student volunteer to bring a draft a day early. On this day, I ask for two other volunteers and as a class, we go through a structured protocol for responding to a draft. I sit in on this first conference with the writer and two volunteers to model the process, and the rest of the class surrounds us in a fishbowl set up. Students have a handout (see Figure) and we discuss how to frame our comments before the model conference starts. We will be honest and fully engaged. We will be specific and kind in our feedback. We will have our drafts on time. We will be active listeners. We will have a positive attitude about workshop. We will be open minded in listening to feedback. We will stay focused (stay off phone, not work on other things). Figure: Period 2 Commitments This protocol begins with the writer reading the piece aloud, with copies of drafts that students in the writing group read along with. In early stages, the reading out loud bothers some students, but when they hear awkward wording or other errors, they notice things they didnt when just looking on the page. Depending on the genre of the writing, one person in the writing group summarizes the gist of the piece, the plot of the story, the claim, the thesis, etc. The rest of the group adds to this or amends it. The ensuing discussion is listened to by the writer, who is not allowed to speak until the end of the conversation. The group then discusses strengths in the piece, pointing to specific evidence, and then opportunities for revision. All of this is done using the very specific language on their handout. The focus is on what the writer did. So instead of platitudes like, This is great or This needs work, students are encouraged to say things like, When you [name something the writer wrote or a move MAKING MEANING 83 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 87 1/22/20 3:10 PM the writer made], it had the effect of. . . . In other words, what did it do for you as a reader? Our goal in these conversations is to help the writer make the piece what he or she wants it to be. Therefore we avoid language like, I would . . . or You should. . . . This is very cumbersome at first. There are pauses and silences as students look at the handout, thinking about how to frame the feedback. I point out in our fishbowl the importance of taking this time and not worrying about awkward silences. Once the small group has finished the conversation, the writer can ask questions or get clarification about comments made. The writer can also bring up specifics that may not have been addressed. For example, I really struggled with the conclusion. What do you think of it? This is a crucial part of the process, because when I then conference individually with students, the first thing I might ask is, What feedback did you get from your writing group? If the student says nothing, I would follow up with, What questions did you ask your group to help you know what you need to do next? Because I am sitting with students for this practice session, I can help them with the language they use in talking with each other and model it for them. We end with asking the writer if he or she has a sense of what can be done to revise before submitting the assignment. Ive never had a student say no. A benefit to each member having a copy of the drafts is that students can make editing comments and notes as they listen to the draft being read aloud. When the draft is returned to the student, he or she can compare editing notes and make decisions from there. I model and emphasize that unless editing issues distract from understanding, they dont need to be discussed in the peer review. The listeners can also capture their initial responses so they dont forget them for the discussion, and the student has a record in case he or she forgets feedback when returning to the draft to revise. When we finish the model conference, we open up the discussion to the whole class and have them debrief about what they noticed in the conference and share what they think of the process. This often results in questions about the feedback. I tell students that ultimately, the decisions they make about whether to accept or reject suggestions 84 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 88 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM should depend on their intent for the piece. They also comment that other benefits of the conferences include hearing where others are in their drafts, getting ideas from each other and feeling better about where they are in the process. The next important step is for me to observe conferences, especially early in the year and continue to nudge students toward productive conversations. Usually by the third piece of the year, they are functioning independently. My one-on-one conferences with students after theyve submitted a paper or before the final draft help me to see if any of the groups are struggling as well. I keep writing groups together for the course of the semester so they build rapport. If I thought things werent going well, I would re-mix the group, but thankfully I havent had that experience. I do not assign a grade for these conferences or the drafts, but I note if a draft was not present for conferencing because it is part of a process category on the final rubric. Students quickly see a correlation between their participation and their final drafts. Even after a score, I let students continue to revise after conferences with me until the end of the grading period, which may overlap with other writing assignments. For students who are struggling, this might be a requirement, but framed as helping the writer improve and get the targeted instruction necessary to do so. We also do some focused work with specific revision strategies so students know what to do with the feedback they are given. If I am told I need to slow down and give the details of something thats happening, I might try Barry Lanes Explode a Moment. If organization is an issue, I might try a reverse outline or cut and paste revision to reorder. Revision that is embedded in a course empowers students to do their best work, but it is a skill that must be taught and modeled explicitly. When I first used peer review in the classroom, I didnt see its effectiveness because students would not focus on the task because they didnt know what to say. They would read each others drafts and say, That was great, and move on to the next person. I tried an online platform once and the result was a student crying about harsh feedback. The results were no different than the days when I MAKING MEANING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 89 85 1/22/20 3:10 PM would grade a paper, give it back to a student and ask for revision, receiving instead a freshly edited copy of the same material. Now I see significant differences from draft to draft and students taking more risks because someone said to them, What would happen if? instead of You should. . . . 86 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 90 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM Blackout Revision: A Strategy for Playful De/Construction of Student Drafts Mark Latta This revision strategy emerged from a workshop that Michael Jackman, senior lecturer of writing at Indiana University Southeast, recently led at the Flanner Community Writing Center in Indianapolis. The workshop discussed blackout poetry and invited participants to a process of creating blackout poems from news articles and IRS manuals. I attended the workshop and found blackout poetry so enjoyable that I decided to integrate the practice into my writing classroom. One realization I had while creating blackout poems was how the process forced me into a close-reading gaze and invited me to re-see the text in new, previously unexplored ways. Blackout poetry encourages the reworking of texts by locating and noticing various centers of gravity, themes, and linguistic structures. Based on this insight, blackout poetry seemed well suited as a revision strategy for student-authored drafts in addition to its use as a remixing technique for published texts. What is Blackout Poetry? Blackout poetry (also called erasure poetry) is created through the erasure of words and letters in previously printed works. Using newspaper clippings or other published works (books, menus, and even IRS manuals work well, too), authors black out words and letters with a Sharpie marker to rework the text. Through the erasure and removal of text, space, and punctuation, writers create blackout poetry like a wood carving where the excess wood is removed to reveal the hidden object inside (Ladenheim 46). This process can be replicated digitally as well, as the Figure demonstrates. Here, a passage from the IRS Taxpayer Bill of Rights, The Right to Challenge the IRS Position and Be Heard, is reworked through the blackout process to create a poem, The Challenge to Be Heard. The resulting poem is revealed using the highlight feedback in Microsoft Word. By setting the highlight color to black, MAKING MEANING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 91 87 1/22/20 3:10 PM Figure: Creation of The Challenge to be Heard through Blackout Poetry students are able to generate blackout poems digitally. The Challenge to Be Heard reworks text from the IRS to say something about the difficulties and frustrations of attempting to be heard and being treated unfairly. The process of composing blackout poetry invites writers to create through erasure and removal: Whats exciting about the poems is that by destroying writing you can create new writing. You can take a strangers random words and pick and choose from them to express your own personal vision (Kleon xv). This version of text rendering through creative destruction requires the author to look closely at letters, words, spaces, and punctuation in order to reimagine other arrangements. It is this close reading and de/reconstruction that make blackout poems ideal as a revision activity. Blackout Poetry as a Revision Activity This revision exercise assumes the high school or first-year college class has previously spent some time composing blackout poetry (perhaps as an idea generation activity) and that students are familiar with the process. As a revision technique, blackout poetry is well 88 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 92 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM suited to help writers locate centers of gravity within their writing, identify themes and thematic connections, and help reveal allegorical possibilities. While I find this process most helpful for personal, persuasive, and creative nonfiction essays, I have also used this activity within research writing and have been pleased with the results. When I incorporate blackout poetry as a revision activity, I prefer to time the activity to occur when students are working with drafts that are somewhere between developed and nearly complete. Ideally, drafts are between one and two pages in length, although completing this process with paragraph drafts is also possible. Although Figure 1 demonstrates the creation of a blackout poem with a concise text, the process of creating a blackout poem with longer works is manageable within a 50-60 minute block of time. To complete a blackout revision, I ask students to bring two printed copies of their working drafts to class. Students first work in pair-and-shares. Before exchanging drafts with their partner, each student spends one to three minutes describing the main ideas of their draft. Then, students exchange drafts and read them silently. After each member of the pair completes a silent reading, I then pass out black Sharpie markers and ask each student to compose a blackout poem, using their partners draft, that will help reveal something important about their partners drafts main idea. In other words, can they create a blackout poem from their partners draft that will help reveal something from under the surface of the text? While it is certainly possible to develop more specific suggestions, I find the ambiguity of this prompt usually helps to provide creative space for the text rendering the blackout poetry process requires. After 20 to 30 minutes, I ask students to return the then-draft, now blackout poem to their partner. After a few minutes to read the result of the blackout poetry process, I will ask if anyone would like to read their poems aloud if time allows. This share-out portion of the blackout revision process helps foster connections between seemingly disparate ideas. Finally, after the share-outs are complete, I ask each student to write a brief, one paragraph reflection on the blackout poetry revision process. What was revealed? What did they MAKING MEANING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 93 89 1/22/20 3:10 PM like about the process? What new ideas are developing? How did this process feel? How did it feel to read a poem created from your draft? Often, the close-reading and deconstruction required to generate blackout poems activates the students imagination and fosters a desire to rework the essay. The process helps students to see and imagine new possibilities for their text. To help capture these emerging ideas, I ask students to get messy with their remaining clean copy of their draft (the second copy each student brought). Students are invited to draw arrows between related ideas, create additional blackouts, draw pictures, or highlight passages in different colors. I also encourage students to write notes in the margins or interact with the second draft in a way that will allow a playful reveal of ideas. The goal of this step is to identify a core theme or allegory revealed through the blackout poetry process that students wish to develop further. Additionally, this stage in the blackout poetry process is useful in highlighting that the writing process can look and feel playful and inventive. To underscore this point, I often bring in revision drafts of my writing which have gone through a blackout poetry reveal. Using my past drafts as a guide, I can point to the areas on the page in which core ideas were revealed, highlighted, and developed. Blackout poetry as a revision strategy encourages students to resee and rethink their work, while also revealing connections to the work of their peers. It is also fun. Because of this, I find a less rigid structure within the process of blackout poetry revision to be more helpful than developing too many rules and suggestions. This activity provides an opportunity to see writing as playful and full of potential. More importantly, blackout poetry encourages authors to see beyond their current work and imagine additional possibilities. Works Cited Kleon, Austin. Newspaper Blackout. Harper Perennial, 2010. Ladenheim, Melissa. Engaging Honors Students through Newspaper Blackout Poetry. Honors in Practice, vol. 10, 2014, pp. 4553. United States, Department of Treasury, Internal Revenue Service. The Right to Challenge the IRS Position and Be Heard. The IRS Taxpayer Bill of Rights. 90 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 94 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope: Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms. Southern Illinois University, 2018. 296 pages. $40.00 paperback. ISBN: 978-0-80933-694-4. Reviewed by Wendy Piper These are fraught political times. Economic inequality has been on the rise for decades, and chronic injustices, such as those concerning race and gender, persist. These social problems make their way into the classroom as teachers see their effects in the students they teach. Children from impoverished backgrounds come to school hungry, and students of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds struggle for acceptance among peers and a curriculum that addresses their needs. While various efforts at reform have been made, such programs as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core, ultimately mandate standardized testing as a measure of student and teacher success. This leaves teachers feeling that they have to teach to the test, and often sacrifice their better judgement to the need for high test scores. In the face of all these challenges, everyone seems today to be looking for hope. A senior scholar in Rhetoric and Composition has written a new book that offers such hope. Cheryl Glenn, Distinguished Professor of English and Womens Studies Director at Pennsylvania State University and 2019 winner of the CCCC Exemplar Award, brings her career-long record of administration, teaching, and research interest in equity to the task of reforming our classrooms in a way that empowers students and teachers alike. In Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope, Professor Glenn introduces her concept of rhetorical feminism, a theoretical concept intended to bring the ideology of feminism to bear on the field of rhetorical studies. Her goal is to make the traditionally male field inclusive of women, people of color, the disabled, and diverse Others. As the field becomes more inclusive, Glenn intends that her theoretical concept will also render the field more democratic and vibrant for future scholars of rhetoric. JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 95 VOLUME 34.2 1/22/20 3:10 PM Glenns study is divided into eight chapters: Activism Identities Theories Methods and Methodologies Teaching Mentoring (Writing Program) Administration This Thing Called Hope As the titles suggest, the chapters range from a history of activism, to a survey of theories rhetorical feminists have used as they seek to energize the field, to methods and means of bringing such theories into our research and teaching. By applying the theoretical concept of rhetorical feminism to such different rhetorical contexts, Glenns book revises the field so as to create equality and agency in our classrooms. In the paragraphs that follow, I will focus on selected chapters of interest to the Journal of Teaching Writing readers. Chapter One provides a history of feminist activism in the United States, beginning in the 19th century and including black and white women rhetors who worked for the causes of both abolition and universal suffrage. Names of several high-profile activists are put forth in the chapter, but her discussion of Sojourner Truth stands out for the way in which she exemplifies key features of Glenns theoretical concept. Glenn writes that the dignified black woman, standing six-feet tall, moves and challenges her white audience as she redefines the concept of woman in her Arent I a Woman speech at the Womans Rights Convention in Akron in 1851. As Truth describes her work in the fields, Glenn writes that the speakers reliance on personal experience as evidence, vernacular language, and her physical embodiment of an alternative reality work to subvert the dominant paradigm of the dainty, helpless white southern woman. This introductory chapter provides needed groundwork for the sophisticated theoretical concept that Glenn will later develop, as 92 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 96 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM it displaces the art of persuasion with the feminist values of collaboration, silence, and emotion. Chapter Three provides more helpful examples of the feminist rhetor, this time within the realm of academic theory. In Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers, Glenn argues that Gloria Anzaldua transcends accepted models of argument by utilizing the epistolary form; the letter is not unilinear or finished as, by its nature, it calls for response. Expressing herself in earthy, vernacular language, Anzaldua writes directly to her sister rhetors, those third-world women who might be writing in multi-lingual texts and under socioeconomic and cultural situations not shared by the white man. She thus embodies Glenns rhetorical feminist strategy of purposeful disidentification with the dominant tradition. This example will help readers to think creatively about form and about diverse identities in the classroom. Writing instructors will recognize in Anzalduas unfinished form the emphasis on process rather than product. The example from this professional writer will be useful to teachers focusing on reflection, or the metacognitive moments that enable our students to transfer their writing knowledge from one context to another. The focus on diversity, inclusion, and agency in our classrooms is developed further in Glenns chapter on Teaching. Her practical concern for our students is impressive. Glenn notes that Americans know that having a good teacher is linked to higher income as well as to a range of other social results (128). In a way that echoes her discussion of Anzaldua, she puts the current concept of intersectionality to use in this chapter that mixes theory with practical teaching advice. Rhetorical feminist teachers focus on the cultural location of students in their classrooms; they acknowledge Linda Martin Alcoffs concept of positionality that accounts for gender, race, class, ability, sexuality, language, religion, or other features of our identity that mark relational positions rather than essential qualities . . . (131). Similar to her example of Anzaldua as a writer on the margins who manages to move herself as subject from the periphery to the center, Glenns treatment of identity and intersectionality encourages teachers to help students to discern their own cultural REVIEWS 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 97 93 1/22/20 3:10 PM positions. By empowering students in this way, we can help them to have the confidence to join with their teacher and others/Others in making meaning or constructing knowledge. While Glenns final chapter on Hope is inspirational regarding the possibilities of the concept she has introduced, her chapter on Writing Program Administration provides a final reflection on the progress of the movement of rhetorical feminism. As it reflects on the success of WPAs in implementing feminist ideals into the realworld environment of the programs that they administer, its the only chapter that gives me pause. Speaking as an Administrator in a very large Composition program at Penn State, Glenn laments the status of beleaguered feminist WPAs, who oversee a cadre of equally overworked, often underappreciated writing instructors, most of them women (176). She cites feminist WPA scholar Sue Ellen Holbrook as she argues that the professionalization of composition was actually a feminization of composition (176). Compositions embrace of feminism . . . with its values of nurturance, supportiveness, [and] interdependence, has normalized writing instruction as womens workneither serious, rigorous, or intellectual (Schell 76, qtd in Glenn 177). This is a convincing argument, and Im not sure how this irony that Glenn notes, this task of rhetorical feminism as both a celebration of the feminine, the margins, while actively working against such a code (177) is able to be accomplished. My own perspective here comes from my work experience. As an instructor of writing at an elite liberal arts college for the past fifteen years, the conditions described above that have been attributed to the feminization of composition prevail. The writing faculty at Dartmouth is a cadre primarily of women, most are at the rank of lecturer, and almost overwhelmingly, were non-tenure-track. We are collegial and collaborative. (We drew up the Outcomes for our required first-year writing courses together, for instance.) We share office space. For the most part we are non-hierarchical, egalitarian, and democratic. As we all know, the teaching of writing as process is labor intensive. Much of our time is spent in commenting on drafts and meeting with individual students. The labor intensiveness 94 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 98 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM of teaching writing alone is prohibitive to publishing for most of us. Its difficult to see, then, how the prestige of a writing department can rise within an academic environment that values research. Indeed, writing programs are often made up of graduate students, adjuncts, trailing spouses, and often individuals without the PhD. The interest of many hard-working instructors lies primarily in teaching rather than in research in Writing Studies, and with that interest no doubt comes the feminine values of nurturance and supportiveness toward students. I wonder, then, if we can askat the same time that we celebrate these valuesthat writing departments move out of their subaltern status. Glenn does acknowledge that despite the efforts of feminist WPAs, the continued conditions over which the WPA presides have not changed much. A constellation of factors, including the very feminization of the field that Glenn reports, prevents rising in that hierarchy. The book ends on Hope, however, as its final chapter. Glenns intention is to offer not a conclusion, but to pause on a sense of openness that includes contradictions, incompleteness, and hope (193). These are days when such hope is especially needed. The inequities that plague our society and provide easy slogans for political campaigns show up in concrete and often distressing forms in our classrooms. We need to be able to address the needs our students bring us. Cheryl Glenns new book helps us with this task. She asks important questions, and it is up to readers to give serious thought to the intellectual project she poses. How is it that we go about breaking down conceptual barriers that have caused women, people of color, LGBTQ, the disabled, the global poor, the marginalized, to be left out? Glenn offers a theoretical vision as well as practical suggestions for teachers in the classroom that possibly provide an answer. Works Cited Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetorical Feminism and this Thing Called Hope: Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms. Ed. Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan. Southern Illinois University Press, 2018. REVIEWS 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 99 95 1/22/20 3:10 PM Holbrook, Sue Ellen. Womens Work: The Feminization of Composition. Rhetoric Review, vol 9, no. 2, 1991, pp. 201-29. Schell, Eileen. Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction. Boynton, 1998. 96 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 100 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM Denny, Harry, Robert Mundy, Liliana M. Naydan, Richard Svre, and Anna Sicari, eds. Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles. Utah State University Press, 2019. 280 pages. $27.95 eBook/$34.95 paperback. ISBN: 978-1-60732-782-0. Reviewed by Eliana Schonberg Theres a moment in Tammy Conard Salvos Naneun Hangug Samal-Ibnida: Writing Centers and the Mixed-Raced Experience, her contribution to the recent edited collection, Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles, that demonstrates how ofthe-moment this collection is. Exploring the challenges of navigating the world as a person of mixed race, of feeling othered in all communities she inhabits, she writes honestly and openly about her prior decisions to keep identity politics out of her professional life and, specifically, out of her work as a writing center administrator. She describes the complications of choosing photos with which to represent herself online, torn between appearing too serious or being accused of having her eyes closed, a physiological manifestation of the Korean portion of her mixed racedness. I called the one person I thought would understand, my sister, Conard Salvo writes. I thought she would sympathize and commiserate, but she gave me no solace or comfort because her own exhaustionthe entire countrys exhaustionwith identity issues has boiled over into anger over political correctness and the constant state of offense in which everyone is mired (98). The comment is one of several moments throughout Harry Denny, Robert Mundy, Liliana M. Naydan, Richard Svre, and Anna Sicaris book, in which readers are groundedsome might say brusquely droppedin the present-day reality of American politics. As a reader, this timeliness gave me pause; I wondered if this collection will feel as fresh and exigent a decade from now or if it will take on the interest of a valuable fossil. Will we assign the text to consultants for insights into still-pressing questions or as an historical artifact of a particular political moment? JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 101 VOLUME 34.2 1/22/20 3:10 PM But then I realized the question is moot, because, not three weeks after finishing reading the book, I assigned Talisha Haltiwanger Morrisons Being Seen and Not Seen: A Black Female Body in the Writing Center as reading for my annual pedagogy seminaran intensive workshop for undergraduates, graduate students, and professional tutors. The article sparked a lively and engaged discussion about issues of race, but also, and even more so, about how tutors make decisions to bring their personal identities into sessions with writers, about what sense of personal and emotional safety they risk, and when those risks are worth it and when they might not be. My students and colleagues talked about how to approach writers with an openness to shared humanity, an optimism about the potential for change and growth, and also a clear-eyed sense of the inequities built into the social fabric in which tutors and writers operate. Who cares if this lasts, I thought, we need this now! And it is precisely because we need this now that the collection is such an important addition to any writing centers shelveseven if some of the essays are less inspiring than others, even if some identity questions are less-than-adequately represented within the covers. The editors acknowledge these failings, especially when it comes to the section on (dis)ability, a section with only one contributor, a fact that only highlights the need for the field to do more research on students with disabilities (237). But in a project of such ambitious scope, with pieces on race, multilingualism, religion, class, and of course, (dis)ability, there are bound to be areas that are less fully realized. Overall, these essays consider various questions of identity sensitively and with attention to current scholarly conversations, and the interweaving of thoughtful editors review essays contextualizing each section fills in any gaps. In the best possible way, one might say this is Harry Dennys book. His first book, Facing the Center: Towards an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring, is cited in a large percentage of the articles, a fact that is appropriate and not at all surprising given the paucity of scholarship on these topics in writing centers. But also, a glance at the author bios reveals strong professional links between Denny and many of the contributors (a third of the essays were written by his 98 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 102 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM current or former students), and several authors explicitly describe learning from Dennys mentoring style and teaching in their own deployments of identity politics in their work. I raise this lineage not to suggest that the editors cast their contributor net too narrowly, but rather to note that if Harry Denny can find three of his student tutors to contribute essays on religion in writing centers (concerning Christian, Jewish, and Muslim identities within writing center settings), then each of us should also be able to find three tutors to fill the religion sectionand if we cant, then either were hiring badly or not looking hard enough, and this collection reminds us exactly why we should change both of those things as quickly as possible. It also reminds us why we should be reading and assigning these essays to our tutoring staff so as to expand our possible identity conversations beyond whatever confines our institutional demographics might impose upon our staff makeup or hiring possibilities. I found myself reading and noting the ways that Out in the Center highlighted previously overlooked elements of my own positionality as a writing center director. When I was asked to review this text, my first response was, You want me? Im cisgendered, straight, white, and not a first-generation university studentsurely Im not the appropriate reviewer here. I have often enjoyed the privilege of having my identities be treated as normative in professional settings. But then, as I reflected on the essays in this collection, I realized that for years my out-of-office messages have identified the Jewish holidays Im observingprecisely because I wanted to make my students feel less guilty about taking time away for their own religious observances. And for the past two years that I closed my office door at least once each day to pump breast milk for my daughter, I would place a sign on the door that read, If you see this sign, it means Im pumping milk for my baby. I will be happy to help you by phone or email until I reopen the door. Several people asked if I might not prefer a sign to simply say I was in a meeting, but that would reinforce the invisibility of the labor of parenting, specifically for working mothers with young children. And how would my in a meeting sign help graduate students argue for REVIEWS 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 103 99 1/22/20 3:10 PM better parental leaves or help administrative assistants without an office door argue for better arrangements than trekking across campus to a hard-to-reserve pumping room, using break time to do so? I say this not to valorize my choices, but to point to the ways in which I found unexpected identities of mine also present in Out in the Center and to the ways it might help other writing center directors, teachers, and students think more broadly about what identities they might choose to out in various educational settings. In the next offering of my consultant pedagogy class, I am assigning Sami Korgans essay On Guard! and Ella Leviyevas Coming Out as Jewish at a Catholic University alongside readings on racial literacy. Both Korgan and Leviyevas essays provide well-written personal reflections on evolving religious identities (Christian and Jewish, respectively) during the college years. I expect my undergraduate writing consultants will find the essays relatable and that the topics addressed will hit home for some. These are also essays that complicate the often-dichotomous understanding of religion in contemporary discourse, and, as such, they might also make interesting points of departure for discussion among high schoolers and their teachers. In putting together my syllabus, I struggled with not also assigning Hadi Banats Floating on Quicksand: Negotiating Academe While Tutoring as a Muslim, a nuanced reflection on navigating the complicated religious and national identities of a Palestinian Muslim in Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States, both in the classroom and in the writing center. Banat addresses the difficulty of not fitting in easily in expat communities in any location, as well as the politically loaded nature of being Muslim in the United States right now. The essay would make an excellent addition to any pedagogy reading group for teachers interested in finely tuned insights into the complexity of the identities with which their students and colleagues may be struggling. Overall, the religion section is prompting me to introduce the topic with my student staff as part of our larger conversations surrounding diversity and inclusion, something I had heretofore been hesitant to do. 100 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 104 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM And at some point this semester I will have my entire staff read Richard Svres Black Male Bodies in the Center, for its frank portrayal of how hard it is to navigate the cultural assumptions surrounding black male bodies, especially within writing centers where questions of power and authority are already fraught. As Svre reminds us, in writing center practice . . . physicalityones immutable traitsis the first point of reference that unconsciously, or perhaps consciously, sets the tone for our interactions. And thus how we go about the work of the center is inherently rooted in a discourse that intersects with perceptions associated with race and gender (46). If this quoteand this collectionargue nothing else, it is that addressing these topics is fundamental rather than tangential to the work of writing centers. Harry Dennys essay, Of Queers, Jeers, and Fears: Writing Centers as (Im)Possible Safe Spaces, located in the center of the collection, grounds the risks of the work in personal narratives that map out, in chilling detail, how easy it can be to end up, as he puts it, on the wrong side of a game of identity politics (115). Dennys essay pulls no punches in both articulating the risks (personal and collective) of advocating for change and social justice through considering identity in writing center work and in reminding us that we should take up the challenge regardless: Writing centers, of course, dont exist in a vacuum; the wider world seeps in, whether through the mindsets of those working there, the assignments writers bring with them, or interaction that forces interpersonal dynamics that might not otherwise happen. Some might argue our business is exclusive to the teaching and mentoring of writers, that we ought to save the world on our own time, as Stanley Fish (2003) once claimed. The reality is that writers and writing exist in a social world involving communicative transactions among people who represent complex dynamics, histories, and identities. The interaction intrinsic to the everyday teaching and learning in writing centers requires negotiation, and that negotiation REVIEWS 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 105 101 1/22/20 3:10 PM invites conflict that must be owned and mitigated, if possible. (121) Dennys words point to the value this collection holds for teachers and students of all kinds, within and without writing centers. Writing conferences between classroom teachers and students (at any level) are never just about the text any more than those that occur in the writing center. Certainly those working outside a center may choose to skip certain essays or work to translate them to external contexts. Some, such as Alexandria Locketts A Touching Place: Womanist Approaches to the Center, Nancy Alvarezs On Letting the Brown Bodies Speak (and Write), and Anna Rita Napoleones Class Division, Class Affect, and the Role of the Writing Center in Literacy Practices, while thought-provoking and engaging, are truly aimed at a writing center audience. Others, such as Anna Sicaris Everyday Truths: Reflections from a Woman Writing Center Professional, which takes up the challenges of leading-while-female in academia, considering the challenges through lenses of personal reflection, Adrienne Rich, and still more contemporary political vignettes, will resonate with women in leadership positions across educational settings. Also, in the section on Gender and Sexuality, Robert Mundys The Politics of I Got It: Intersections, Performances, and Rhetorics of Masculinities in the Center is a nuanced consideration of the intersections of maleness and class in academia. It took me two readings to appreciate the complexity of the argument, but I was glad I returned to itas a woman in the academy, it was an important reminder that identity politics are fraught in different but no less complicated ways for my male colleagues and students. Similarly, Liliana Naydans Academic Classism and Writing Center Worker Identity, provides intellectual fodder for any academics concerned with questions of class and labor broadly understood. While the essay speaks specifically to the challenges of occupying a writing center leadership position (one that, by its definition involves managerial labor and the expenditure of funds) as a contingent faculty member without institutional authority or budgetary control, its cautionary tale can be appreciated by multiple 102 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 106 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM audiencesI would argue, in fact, that it should be required reading for graduate students about to enter the academic job market. So should Beth Towles Other Peoples Houses: Identity and Service in Writing Center Work, a lyrical personal essay reflecting on writing center work as service work. The piece eloquently articulates what it feels like to be a first-generation graduate student choosing to enter academia as a long-term career and identity. Perhaps this essay should be required reading for upper administration as well. Where the collection grounds itself most firmly in writing center studies is in the editors review essays at the end of each section. Here writing center professionals will find other sources to consider, suggestions for future research questions and research methodologies, and questions to pose in discussing these topics with tutors as part of ongoing tutor trainings. These are also the places where newer members of the field may look for some guidance as they decide how to incorporate these questions into their administrative and scholarly agendas and identities. For example, the Review essay on the Gender and Sexuality section asks writing center professionals to consider the following questions, among others: What happens when we enforce dress codes in the writing center? Who are we excluding and what bodies are we further marginalizing? Are we empowering the women who are in our centers and preparing them for leadership? What does male leadership look like and how do we respond to it? . . . How have we been complicit in policing sexualities and genders in our centers? How do we create an inclusive pedagogy for all genders and sexualities? (142) A first step towards an inclusive pedagogy would be working from this collection, because regardless of whether it ends up being timeless, it is certainly both timely and necessary. REVIEWS 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 107 103 1/22/20 3:10 PM Works Cited Denny, Harry C. Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-To-One Mentoring. Utah State UP, 2010. Denny, Harry, Robert Mundy, Liliana M. Naydan, Richard Svre, and Anna Sicari, eds. Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles. Utah State UP, 2018. 104 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 108 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM ABOUT THE AUTHORS Brandie Bohney taught high school English for nearly a decade before she decided to pursue her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing. She is a doctoral candidate at Bowling Green State University, and her dissertation research focuses on how early-career secondary English teachers develop their writing pedagogies and practice. Her other research interests include language diversity in writing instruction, crowdsourcing in the classroom, and rhetorics of womanhood. Lisbeth Chapin is Associate Professor of English and Writing Program Coordinator at Gwynedd Mercy University, near Philadelphia. Her research involves a study of the materiality of nature in the works of Percy and Mary Shelley, especially in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, and also the teaching of writing in General Education courses. She has published in The Wordsworth Circle, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Grave Notes and recently in Composition Forum: Implementing Writing Intensive Gen Ed Seminars at a Small, Catholic University. Anna Daley teaches concurrent credit English at Boise High School in Boise, Idaho. She earned her Masters in Teaching English Language Arts from Boise State University, where she is also an adjunct faculty member. She is grateful to the Boise State Writing Project (an affiliate of the National Writing Project) for decades of excellent professional development and teacher community. Outside the classroom, she enjoys running, learning mandolin and guitar, and adventuring out of doors with her husband and their two young boys. Mark Latta teaches writing and directs the writing center at Marian University (Indianapolis). He also directs the Flanner Community Writing Center and is involved in a number of community literacy initiatives throughout Indianapolis. Latta is a JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 109 VOLUME 34.2 1/22/20 3:10 PM Ph.D. candidate in Urban Education Studies at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. Katie Nagrotsky is a doctoral candidate in English Education at Teachers College. Both her teaching and research are influenced by her work in public schools, where Katie taught middle school English for nine years. Wendy Piper teaches writing and rhetoric in the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric at Dartmouth College. She teaches first-year writing and an upper-level course in the Rhetoric of Media Culture. Her research and teaching interests include Writing Studies, pedagogy, and American literary and cultural studies. She can be contacted at Wendy.Piper@Dartmouth.edu. Nidhi Rajkumar earned her Doctorate in Rhetoric, Composition and Pedagogy from the University of Houston and has taught multiple levels of composition courses over the course of her professional engagement with UH. Her areas of research focus on multimodality in various aspects of composition pedagogy, including multimodality as a means to effectively address the growing cultural diversity in present-day composition classrooms of American universities. Eliana Schonberg is the Director of the TWP Writing Studio at Duke University where she is also Associate Professor of Practice in the Thompson Writing Program. Her research interests include writing center studies, transfer of learning, student self-efficacy, and collaboration. She is currently a co-editor of The Writing Center Journal. Her work has been published in The Writing Lab Newsletter, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, The Writing Center Journal, and Across the Disciplines. Paula Uriarte teaches high school English and adjunct courses at Boise State University. She is a co-director of the Boise State Writing Project and faculty coordinator for Valley Visions, the Boise School 106 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 110 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM Districts art and literary magazine. She teaches English 101, Creative Writing, and AP Literature and Composition. Amy D. Williams teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level composition courses at Brigham Young University. She researches how students experience writing in and outside of classrooms. ABOUT THE AUTHORS 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 111 107 1/22/20 3:10 PM 108 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 112 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM ANNOUNCEMENTS Journal of Research Administration The Journal of Research Administration is the premier academic, peerreviewed publication in the field of research administration and management. Published twice a year SRAI* Journal articles are dedicated to the education and the professional development of research administrators. The Journal publishes articles covering the changing research environment worldwide, focusing on quality and innovation in research administration. The JRA is a critically important resource for your growth, for the enrichment of the body of knowledge of research administration, and for the advancement of the art and science of the profession and its allied disciplines. For more information on how to submit, please visit the JRA Become a Journal Author page or if you dont know where to start, watch the free webinar How to Write for the Journal, all at www.journalra.org. *Society of Research Administrators International The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning (JAEPL) is a refereed journal open to all those interested in extending the frontiers of teaching and learning beyond traditional disciplines and methodologies. It provides a forum to encourage research, theory, and classroom practice involving expanded concepts of language. It contributes to a sense of community in which scholars and educators from pre-school through the university exchange points of view and cutting-edge approaches to teaching and learning. JAEPL is especially interested in helping those teachers who experiment with new strategies of learning to share their practices and confirm their validity through publication in professional journals. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: intuition, insight, emotion, silence, spirituality, JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING VOLUME 34.2 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 113 1/22/20 3:10 PM meditation, multimodality, environmentalism, ecoliteracy, social justice, (meta)cognition, body wisdom, and felt sense. The Journal of Writing Analytics The Journal of Writing Analytics (Analytics) is a peer-reviewed, open access journal published by Colorado State University Open Press. Additional support for the journal is provided by the University of South Florida. Conceptualized as a multidisciplinary field, Writing Analytics is defined as the study of communication processes and genres as they occur in digital educational environments. The journal operates at the intersection of educational measurement, massive data analysis, digital learning ecologies, and ethical philosophy. Intended to give voice to an emerging community, the journal is devoted to programs of research providing evidence of fair, reliable, and valid analytics. Dedicated to application, such multidisciplinary research will demonstrate its usefulness to educational stakeholders as they expand opportunities for diverse learners. Publication of Analytics is annual and coincides with the conference of Writing Analytics, Data Mining, and Student Success hosted by the University of South Florida. When the conference is announced each year, solicitations will be open for both the conference and the journal. Researchers may submit a manuscript without attending the conference. Submissions for Volume 4 of Analytics will begin on April 1, 2020. The submission period will close on July 1, 2020. For more on the journal, please visit our website: https://wac.colostate.edu/jwa/ 110 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 114 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM M.A. in English @ IUPUI Flexible curriculum Evening and weekend classes 20-Hour Certificates in Teaching Writing, Teaching Literature, or TESOL Thesis or non-thesis option Connections to the Hoosier Writing Project and the Journal of Teaching Writing If you would like information about our program, please visit our website: http://liberalarts.iupui.edu/english/ or contact Karen Kovacik: kkovacik@iupui.edu. ANNOUNCEMENTS 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 115 111 1/22/20 3:10 PM Graduate Certificate in Teaching Writing Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Engaging Writers, Achieving Literacy Understand the nature of the writing process and how it can be effectively taught Create effective writing assignments with support activities and assessment tools Examine the relationship between critical reading and writing Develop and articulate a clearer sense of your own theory of teaching writing These are some of the learning outcomes you can expect when you enroll in IUPUIs Graduate Certificate in Teaching Writing. The Certificate is a 20-hour program of study for certified middle school or high school teachers, part-time university writing faculty and lecturers in other disciplines, and M.A. students interested in earning a certificate in writing to enhance their professional teaching careers. The Certificate requires completion of five graduate courses consisting of one core course and four elective courses. Evening courses are available during the academic year, and summer courses are offered in two-, four-, and six-week sessions to accommodate teachers schedules. Graduate credits earned can be applied toward the M.A. in English upon acceptance into the M.A. Apply online in minutes: no GRE scores, no letters of recommendation. Send a statement of interest and a teaching license or transcript showing you completed an undergraduate baccalaureate degree with a minimum 3.0 GPA. For further information and to apply online, visit the English Departments website (www.iupui.edu) or contact Thomas Gonyea, Program Coordinator, at 317-274-2258. 112 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 116 JOURNAL OF TEACHING WRITING 1/22/20 3:10 PM Graduate Certificate in Teaching Literature Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Learn techniques for teaching all genres Integrate reading and writing assignments Understand best practices in assessment Incorporate new technologies 20 credit hours Courses available in the daytime, evening, and online. Certificate students may apply credit hours toward the Masters degree in English upon successful admission to M.A. program. For more information contact Dr. Megan Musgrave, Director of the Literature Program, at memusgra@iupui.edu. ANNOUNCEMENTS 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 117 113 1/22/20 3:10 PM 338456-JTW_Text_34-2.indd 118 1/22/20 3:10 PM  ...

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... N E WS L E T T E R & R E V I E W Volume 58 z No. 2 Winter 2015 Cather and Europe Willa Cather NEWSLET TER & R EVIEW Volume 58 z No. 2 | Winter 2015 18 4 23 12 39 29 35 45 50 CONTENTS 1 2 Letters from the Executive Director and the President Cather in Europe, Europe and Cather: The 2014 Symposium in Rome, Italy Andrew Jewell and Mark J. Madigan 4 Willa Cathers Individual Map of Paris Julie Olin-Ammentorp 12 Willa Cather and the Art of Recoverable Contexts: Source Materials for One of Ours z Richard C. Harris 18 Becoming Cosmopolitan: The European Encounter with the New World in Death Comes for the Archbishop Nalini Bhushan 23 Latin Perspectives and Special Friendships in the Aeneid and The Professors House z Cristina Giorcelli 29 An Elegy for the Reader: Europe and the Narrative of Self-formation in Lucy Gayheart z Richard H. Millington 35 Pierre Loti and Willa Cathers Journey Home: So Near, So Far z Franoise Palleau-Papin 39 What Is There about Us Always: The Archbishop and Willa Cathers [Roman] Catholic Imagination Diane Prenatt 45 Fair Rosamond and Fierce Rosamund: European Models for the Older Daughter in The Professors House Peter M. Sullivan 50 The Translation in the Closet: Willa Cather and Marguerite Yourcenar z Stphanie Durrans 56 On the cover: The Panthon, Eugne Atget, 1924, from The J. Paul Getty Museum. The Haunting Continent: Europe in Cather z John J. Murphy Letter from the Executive Director Ashley Olson Warm greetings to each of our friends and supporters as the year draws to a close and 2016 begins. Im confident youll find satisfaction in this issues insightful scholarship that developed out of our three-day scholarly symposium held in Rome in June 2014. As I embarked on my own first European voyageregretfully by air and not on one of the grand ocean liners that Cather took on her European travelsI could not help but think about the similar thrill she surely felt to experience new cultures and cities for the first time. In a 1908 letter to her brother, Roscoe (which youll see referenced more than once in this issue), she remarked, I got my guide book for Rome the other day. Seems queer to be really on the way to Rome; for of course Rome has always existed for one, it was a central fact in ones life in Red Cloud and was always the Capital of ones imagination. Rome, London, and Paris were serious matters when I went to the South ward school Letter from the President Thomas Reese Gallagher A confession: we were a number of weeks into 2015 before it occurred to us to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Cather Foundations 1955 founding. Maybe that was due to modesty, or a certain ambivalence about things like sixtieth birthdays (ahem). Mainly, I think, it was because our everyday responsibilities and programs and projects demanded virtually all of the attention of our small, dedicated, and chronically overworked staff and team of volunteers. But thanks to them weve had a great year, marked by our biggest and most successful Spring Conference ever and a great surge in momentum in our plans to build the National Willa Cather Center. When we did take the time to indulge in a long look back over our sixty-year history, it seemed that 2015 was a year that might do our founders proud. These were people whose dedication and labor and perseverance and generosity formed the strong foundation that still supports us today. We owe them a good deal, so lets say their names and honor their memory: Mildred Bennett, Carrie Miner Sherwood, Jennie Miner Reiher, Harry and Helen Obitz, Frank ORourke, Josephine Frisbie and L. V. Jacks. The highlights of our first sixty years include the acquisition and preservation of numerous historic properties and objects www.WillaCather.org they were the three principal cities in Nebraska, so to speak. After painstaking research and study (through the archives of our imaginations), we have located a rare, priceless map showing these principal cities of Nebraska. We have reproduced it on our back cover of this issue, and we will have no comment regarding questions of its authenticity. But to return now to serious matters. To the Willa Cather Foundations leadership and Board of Governors, that means doing all we can to spur new scholarship and to drive interest in Cathers life and work. As we prepare to close the book on our 60th anniversary year, we owe sincere thanks to the scholars who continue their research endeavors; the educators who find value in introducing their students to Cathers work; the visitors who make pilgrimages to Red Cloud; and the members and donors who enable us to sustain our programs while preserving the historic community of readers imaginations. Since our founding in 1955, a rising tide has ensured Cathers legacy as one of our greatest American novelists, and our task is to celebrate that achievement. Thank you for being part of this historic journey. And next year, bring a friend aboard. associated with Cathers life and work; the development of strong institutional alliances, such as with the Nebraska State Historical Society and the University of Nebraska Cather Project, which have helped assure our viability; thousands of visitors, including many who come again and again, and such distinguished guests as John G. Neihardt, Eudora Welty, Maya Angelou, David McCullough, Julie Harris and Eva Marie Saint; the awarding of student scholarships totaling more than $150,000; sixty Spring Conferences and fourteen International Cather Seminars; the restoration of the Red Cloud Opera House; the establishment of an operating endowment and strong financial management; and, among many other accomplishments, the publication of this journal since 1957. Its a record were proud of and hope to continue. Sure, weve had the occasional misstep (do you still have your Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial ashtray?), but we do our best. I started writing this letter in New York City, my home, with the usual distractions and noises of the city interfering with my progress (as they do). I am completing it in Nebraska, where I was born and raised, and where I spend more and more of my time. The noises and distractions interfering with my progress now are courtesy of the construction crews hard at work creating the National Willa Cather Center from the shell of the historic Moon Block building in Red Cloud. Sometime during 2016, our new facility will open, providing new archival resources and a grand new setting for the ambitious plans were cooking up for the coming years. 1 Cather in Europe, Europe and Cather: The 2014 Symposium in Rome, Italy Andrew Jewell and Mark J. Madigan In Rome, to walk across the street sometimes requires a leap of faith. Cars and motorcycles stream by, and at many places there are no lights or crosswalks. So, to get across, those on foot wait for a small group to gather at the curb and then, unceremoniously, step into the stream. The vehicles all stop, without impatience or surprise, and give the walkers the right of way. It doesnt seem like it should work, but it does. Planning for the 2014 Willa Cather Symposium in Rome required a similar leap of faith. We knew it could be done, but it seemed daunting. Could we find the right place? Could we find the resources? Would anybody come? Initial doubts were many and for a while as we began they flowed into one another. Thankfully, a small group of colleagues had gathered to worry and discuss: John Murphy, Robert Thacker, Cristina Giorcelli, the two of us, and the staff of the Willa Cather Foundation, most especially its Executive Director, Ashley Olson. Many others offered encouragement and support along the way. All together we stepped off the curb and made it across, and far more than successfully. Our primary goal was to hold a symposium that explored Cathers relationship to Europe and European culture. We wanted to better understand the importance of various European influences on Cathers life and imaginative work, as well as Cathers impact on European audiences. Cather traveled to Europe several times in her life, and twice visited Italy. She also pointed to European culture as centrally important to her life from an early age, noting in a letter to her brother Roscoe in March 1908 shortly before leaving on her first trip to Italy that it seems queer to be really on the way to Rome; for of course Rome has always existed for one, it was a central fact in ones life in Red Cloud and was always the Capital of ones imagination. Rome, London, and Paris were serious matters when I went to the South ward schoolthey were the three principal cities in Nebraska, so to speak. So she thought and believed. The symposium, held from June 1214, 2014, at the Centro Studi Americani, featured more than thirty presentations from scholars exploring these themes. This special issue of the Newsletter & Review features a selection of the papers that considered the European influences on Cather and her work. Another special issue, currently in the planning stage, will feature essays exploring Cather in translation in specific languages and the publication and reception of her work in those countries. It will be based on papers presented at the Rome Symposium and augmented by other submissions as well. 2 Another goal of our symposium was to support and promote scholarly and popular interest in Cather beyond the borders of North America. While we were successful in that regard, there remains much important work to be done. We are still learning about Cathers influence on various European readersher work has been translated into most of the major European languagesbut it appears that in many areas her work is not as well known as that of other American writers. Some European scholars of American literature have discovered Cather and published criticism about her work, and in the last decade translations of her novels have been published in Bulgarian, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish (as well as Japanese, Korean, Kyrgyz, and Thai). That is, Cathers work is known abroad, but it should be better known. Working with our international colleagues in Rome was among the most rewarding and enjoyable endeavors of our careers, and we hope Cather in Europe, Europe and Cather will inspire future international conferences and further efforts to expand Cathers international readership. In addition to the wonderful presentations at the symposium, those in attendance greatly enjoyed the elegant space of the Centro Studi Americani. Located in a former palace constructed in the seventeenth century, its rooms feature frescoes by some of the leading Tuscan and Flemish artists of the period. Our presence in this wonderful environment was made possible by a generous gift from the estate of Harriet Shadegg, given by Harriets family members John and Sally Murphy. We both thank the Murphy family very much for this kindness; the symposium was made affordable and enjoyable for those who came in large part because of this gift. We would be remiss not to mention that while none of us has ever been poorly fed at a Cather event, we cannot recall being better fed than in Rome. Our prodigious and delectable catered lunches and symposium dinner earned superlatives from all assembled. Camaraderie is greatly enhanced when one can enjoy a beautiful Italian lunch and a little light wine between sessions. These meals and the fellowship they inspired were an appropriate homage to Willa Cather, a woman who valued good cuisine and the rewarding conversation that flows with it. For our meals and local arrangements, including securing the elegant meeting rooms at the Centro Studi Americani, we are indebted to our codirector Cristina Giorcelli. We are grateful to Evelyn Funda for hosting a convivial happy hour gathering as well. Grazie mille! Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 When Willa Cather made her first trip to Europe two years into the twentieth century, she was twenty-eight years old and had yet to publish a book. Making her seventh and final journey across the Atlantic thirty-three years later, she was an acclaimed writer with a burgeoning international readership. As living proof of how widely Cathers reputation has flourished, more than forty scholars from Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Taiwan, and the United States assembled to discuss her personal, intellectual, and creative engagement with Europe for three memorable days. As the work in this issue of the Newsletter & Review makes clear, the event was a successful one, providing many insights into Cathers relationship to Europe. We are glad that we, with our colleagues, took the leap of faith and organized the event. The quality of the scholarship and the enthusiasm of those in attendance encourage us, and the Cather Foundation, to remember that Cathers remarkable artistry belongs to, and is appreciated by, a very big world. Contributors to this Issue Nalini Bhushan, professor of philosophy at Smith College, has written on aesthetics and on the philosophy of language, of mind, and of science. Her more recent projects explore the intellectual dimensions of the Indian Renaissance (18571947); Minds Without Fear, her coauthored book on that period, will be published by Oxford in 2016. While she has presented papers at several Willa Cather conferences, this is her first publication on Cathers fiction. Stphanie Durrans is professor of American literature at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne and a former Fulbright scholar. She is the author of The Influence of French Culture on Willa Cather: Intertextual References and Resonances (2007) and has recently edited Thy Truth Then Be Thy Dowry: Questions of Inheritance in American Womens Literature (2014). She has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers and is on the advisory board of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Cristina Giorcelli is professor emerita of American literature at the University of Rome Three. Her fields of research are mid- and latenineteenth-century fiction and Modernist poetry and fiction. She is cofounder and codirector of the quarterly journal Letterature dAmerica. She edits a series of volumes on clothing and identity (Abito e Identit) and the University of Minnesota Press has published four volumes as Habits of Being, coedited with Paula Rabinowitz. She was president of the Italian Association of American Studies (19891992) and vice-president of the European Association for American Studies (19942002). Richard C. Harris is the John J. McMullen Professor of Humanities at Webb Institute on Long Island. He has published numerous articles on Cather and is particularly interested in the ways in which she used various literary, artistic, and musical sources in the creation of her fiction. He was the volume editor for the Scholarly Edition of One of Ours (2006). www.WillaCather.org Andrew Jewell, director of the Willa Cather Archive (cather.unl.edu) and coeditor of the forthcoming Complete Letters of Willa Cather, is a professor in the University of NebraskaLincoln Libraries. He is the coeditor, with Janis Stout, of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather. He joined the Board of Governors of the Willa Cather Foundation in 2008. Mark J. Madigan is a professor of English at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York. He is the historical editor of Youth and the Bright Medusa in the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition and editor of three volumes by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a Fulbright Specialist in Zadar, Croatia. Richard H. Millington, the Helen and Laura Shedd Professor of English at Smith College, is the author of essays on Cathers modernism and of Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthornes Fiction; he is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Norton Critical Edition of Hawthornes The Blithedale Romance. John J. Murphy, professor of English emeritus, Brigham Young University, is a member of the Willa Cather Foundation Board of Governors and author of numerous major essays on Cather and of My ntonia: The Road Home; he edited the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop and Penguins My ntonia, and coedited the scholarly edition of Shadows on the Rock and also two volumes of Cather Studies (8 and 11). He directed the first International Cather seminar in 1981 and more recently has codirected the seminars in France and Arizona, and the 2014 Rome symposium, which he helped sponsor. Julie Olin-Ammentorp is a professor of English at Le Moyne College and a member of the Board of Governors of the Willa Cather Foundation. She has published extensively on the works of Cather and Edith Wharton, including essays in Cather Studies 8: Willa Cather: A Writers Worlds and Cather Studies 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures. Her current project is Edith Wharton and Willa Cather: Intersections, a comparative study of the two authors. Like Cather, she has been lucky enough to visit Paris on several occasions. Franoise Palleau-Papin is professor of American literature at Paris-13 University-Sorbonne Paris Cit. After a PhD on Willa Cather, she has authored a critical monograph on David Markson (2009), edited a critical volume on William T. Vollmann (2011), and coauthored An Introduction to Anglophone Theatre (2015). Diane Prenatt is professor of English at Marian University, where she teaches American and European literature and contributes a literature course to the Catholic Studies program. She has published essays in Cather Studies and is working on a biography of Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. Her most recent publication, in Studies in the Humanities, is an essay on Sergeants World War I memoir, Shadow-Shapes (1920). Peter M. Sullivan is professor emeritus at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where he taught German language and literature. He has presented at conferences on Willa Cather and published essays on the German influence on her fiction in Cather Studies, the Nassau Review, and Western Pennsylvania Magazine. 3 Willa Cathers Individual Map of Paris Julie Olin-Ammentorp | Le Moyne College In a letter to her brother Roscoe in 1908, Willa Cather wrote that Rome, London, and Paris were serious matters when I went to the South ward schoolthey were the three principal cities in Nebraska, so to speak (Selected Letters 105). Twenty-seven years later, in her novel Lucy Gayheart, she articulated the concept of the very individual map, explaining that Lucy had her own mental map of Chicago, in which the city of feeling rose out of the city of fact like a definite composition (2627). Born in Virginia, raised there and in Nebraska, immigrant to Pittsburgh and New York City, and traveler across North America and to Europe, Cather was someone to whom place mattered intensely; it is correspondingly important in her works. Long before she ever set foot in Paris, she had a definite, if romanticized, idea of what the city was like; during each of her trips there, in 1902, 1920, 1923, 1930, and 1935, she developed an increasingly detailed and personal knowledge of the city. Like Lucy Gayheart in Chicago, Cather gradually created her own individual map of Paris; so too her characters who encounter Paris have their personal maps of this principal Nebraskan city. For Cather and her characters, the Paris of feeling [rises] out of the city of fact like a definite composition. Cather was one of a long and continuing string of Americans to visit, fall in love with, and write about Paris. Americans from Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, and a bevy of current writers have not only spent considerable time in the city but have written about it evocatively. During the period in which Cather visited Paris, the city played a crucial role in the development of literary modernism; it was home to a range of vitally influential writers and publishers, many of whom were women, as documented by Shari Benstocks Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 19001940. Cather stayed in hotels tantalizingly close to the homes of many of them, including Gertrude Stein, the modernist stylist and art collector, and Sylvia Beach, the founder of the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore and first publisher of James Joyces Ulysses. It would have been a pleasant stroll from Cathers hotel on the Quai Voltaire, where she stayed in 1920 and 1923 (map #1), to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklass residence on the rue du Fleurus (map #2), and a very short walk to the rue de lOdeon location of Beachs bookstore (map #3) where, in the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway was dropping in 4 to borrow books. In her visits to the city, however, Cather apparently met none of these writers, nor does she seem to have been interested in meeting them. Her individual Paris was hers indeed. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: The Ball at the Moulin de la Galette, 1876; Muse dOrsay. Cathers use of Paris in her writings reflects a change from a very romanticized view of the city to a deeper, more personal knowledge of it. Written before she had ever set foot in Paris, her 1899 poem Then Back to Ancient France Again, with its references to Spurred chevaliers who still quaff their wine and to gallants gay, with powdered hair leading women in the stately dance (42), reflects the Paris she had read about in Dumass The Three Musketeers. Her next two poems about the city, both included in her 1903 volume April Twilights, exhibit a somewhat more accurate view of the city, although both lack the stamp of her own distinctive consciousness. The first, The Mills of Montmartre, is about the change this district underwent in the late nineteenth century, as it was transformed from a hill in the countryside covered with working mills into a suburban pleasure ground (map #4). Cathers view of Montmartre has none of the light and charm of Renoirs famous 1876 painting The Ball at the Moulin de la Galette (see illustration); instead is it a moralistic little piece, suggesting that the young women who were once hearty, healthy lasses now trip . . . From idle door to door; The nights are terrible with mirth, / The days ashamed for song, she writes (6667). Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 www.WillaCather.org 5 The second poem about Paris included in April Twilights, entitled simply Paris, exhibits a loftier view of the city: Behind the arch of glory sets the day; The river lies in curves of silver light, The Fields Elysian glitter in a spray Of golden dust; the gilded dome is bright, The towers of Notre Dame cut clean and grey The evening sky . . . (108) Exhibiting neither the romanticism of Then Back To Ancient France Again nor the moralistic response to Montmartre, Paris uses positive terms to describe the city. The opening lines of the poem, quoted above, mention many of the citys famous landmarks: the Arc de Triomphe (the arch of glory; map #5), the Seine, the avenue of the Champs-Elysees (map #6), the gilded dome of the Church of the Invalides (map #7), and so on; the later part of the poem personifies Paris as an empress . . . / Heavy with jewels and arrayed . . . star by star with pride and power (108). Both in its summary of the city and in its figuring of the city as a royal personage, the poem is surprisingly conventional; there is very little that is characteristic of Cather in these poems. Cather included neither The Mills of Montmartre nor Paris in the 1923 and 1933 editions of April Twilights and Other Poems (Thacker 22528), perhaps indicating that she knew they were not her best work. Although Cathers early poetry about Paris reveals little individual sense of the city, her prose writing, in both letters and her travel accounts for the Nebraska State Journal, suggests a traveler and writer who was beginning to identify what most interested her there. One indication of this is her choice of subjects. In a variant on the thing not named, Cather often focused her writing about specific places on what we might call the thing rarely depicted, frequently avoiding the wellknown or popular sights of a place in favor of places less obvious. This pattern is clear in her 1902 travel accounts. E. K. Brown noted that as soon as Cather arrived in Rouen, her report was sharply personal in its focus on Flaubert (102); this was even more the case in Paris. Her sole article about the city was entitled Two Cemeteries in Paris. Although her account begins with the well-known artistic district of Montmartre and a brief description of the Basilica of Sacre Coeur, these passages are merely introductory to one of the two great burial grounds of Paris (Willa Cather in Europe 107), the Cemetery of Montmartre (map #8)surely an unconventional choice of focus for the young travel writer (and quite possibly a disappointment to her readers back in Nebraska, who might have been hoping to hear about Notre 6 Dame, Napoleons Tomb, or other better-known sites). Cather follows her description of the literary graves in the Montmartre Cemetery with one of her trip to the Pre Lachaise Cemetery (map #9), then as now a tourist attraction, but rarely the main reason people go to Paris. In choosing these cemeteries as the main focus of her writing, Cather was beginning to delineate her individual map of Paris. It is a writers map of Paris, and it is this particular writers map. As George Kates points out in Willa Cather in Europe, her commentary on Paris suggests what will become one of her great themes: mortality (102). But it also focuses on immortality: Cathers Paris is one in which the great writers are dead and buried, yet live on as inspirations. She concludes her description of Pre Lachaise by invoking Balzac: It was Balzac himself who used to wander in the Pre-Lachaise in the days of his hard apprenticeship, reading the names on the tombs of the great. Single names, he wrote his sister, Racine, Molire, etc.; names that make one dream. Surely none among all the names there calls up visions more vast (113114). For the young writer, whose first novel was still a decade in the future, wandering in the footsteps of the young Balzac encouraged her to dream big dreamsdreams which may have seemed, back in Pittsburgh or Nebraska, little more than chimeras. As she would write to the editor Ferris Greenslet during her 1920 trip to Paris, I wish you were here. I could tell you a great many things that would sound absurd on either Bank or Park streets! (Selected Letters 293). Cathers first trip to France was a momentous occasion in the twenty-eight-year old writers life, the point at which she began exploring the cultures of the Old World. In turn, she was shaped by them. In many ways Cathers first experience of Paris was what might be seen as standard tourist fare: she explored the citys parks and museums, purchased foolish underclothing and ate delicious food unto discomfort (Selected Letters 65). Yet both her public writing about the trip for the Nebraska State Journal and her private comments in letters delineate the beginnings of a deeper response to Paris. While Cather was writing about food and undergarments to her mother, she was sharing more abstract thoughts with her father, referring to the city as the most beautiful that men have ever had the genius to create. I find new pleasure and wonder in it every day (Selected Letters 65). In a statement that suggests her very high standards and her proneness to disappointment, she singled out Napoleons tomb (map #7) as the only thing I have ever found in the world which did not at all disappoint (66). And she had begun to pay attention to daily life around her, seeing a new way of doing things, one devoted both to Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 careful work and to the enjoyment of life: The people here are the most industrious, neat and painstaking people I have ever seen, and yet they take life comfortably (66). Cather was beginning to see the big picture of French life and culture, beginning to understand something Americans have always found appealing, if initially surprising, in Paris: Eugne Atget: The Panthon, 1924; The J. Paul Getty Museum. that pleasures of the flesh and instruction of the spirit can go hand in hand (Gopnik xvi). The Protestant and Puritanical outlooks that dominated the American view of life (and which dominate The Mills of Montmartre) were left behind, and a new perspective was possible: What a wonderful place! the American thinks, almost against his better Puritan judgment (Gopnik xix). As Edith Wharton, another admirer of France, observed, It was the Puritan races . . . who decided that Art . . . was something apart from life and dangerous to it (39); in Paris, art meant not only the paintings and sculptures in the Louvre and handsome urban architecture, but also the daily things. The seemingly superficial aspects of the city Cather wrote about to her mother were not so different from the more important aspects she praised to her father, but rather the result of the same cultural impulse: in Paris, Cather discovered, beauty could be a part of everyday life. She would acquaint herself further with French culture as she explored other regions of France during her 1902 trip and subsequent trips, developing a deep admiration of French culture that would shape works like Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock. As the historian David McCullough has written, Not all pioneers went west (15). www.WillaCather.org Although Cather never wrote a work set entirely or even primarily in Paris, the city haunted her literary imagination, weaving itself in and out of her work. Paris is an important reference point in Death Comes for the Archbishop: Fathers Latour and Vaillant are prepared for their missions in the New World at the Seminary for Foreign Missions on the rue du Bac (map #10); Father Latour recalls purchasing there the cloth for a cloak, the twin of Father Vaillants (222), which warms him for many years. Latours last thought is of standing in a tiptilted green field among his native mountains, waiting for the diligence [coach] for Paris (315). Paris appears only as an idea in One of Ours; for Claude Wheeler as for Cather, it is one of the principal cities in Nebraska. Early in World War I, when Paris is threatened by a German invasion, Claude and his mother read about the city in an encyclopedia, focusing their attention on its defenses (227229). Later, the soldiers in Claudes company think of Paris, though they never get there. When they imagine it, they do so in very American terms, imagining it as possessing incalculable immensity, bewildering vastness . . . the only attributes they had been taught to admire (449). Given these terms, they imagine that in Paris [t]he Seine . . . must be very much wider and spanned by many bridges. . . . There would be spires and golden domes past counting, all the buildings higher than anything in Chicago, and brilliantdazzlingly brilliant, nothing grey and shabby about it like this old Rouen (449). How disappointed they might have been by Paris, and perhaps particularly Paris as it appears in The Professors House, where grey is a dominant color. By the time Cather completed The Professors House, she had visited Paris three times, spending considerable amounts of time there on each visit. During the 1920 visit, for instance, she spent six or seven weeks in the city, as Edith Lewis recounts, before visiting the World War I battlefields and the grave of her cousin G. P. Cather north of Paris, and returning there afterwards. Although this was the trip during which she was gathering material for the French chapters of One of Ours and during which, in Lewiss words, Cather wanted to live in the Middle Ages (119), she appears also to have been absorbing impressions she would use in The Professors House. Cather and Lewis spent time in the Luxembourg Gardens (map #11), which are quite close to the Panthon (map #12) and the square in front of it. Both are near the Sorbonne and the Latin Quarter (map #13, 14)places which would resonate for the scholarly professor. Yet in an implementation of the thing less obvious, the Sorbonne makes no direct appearance in this academic novel, nor does the Panthon, where so many brilliant French thinkers are entombed. 7 Instead the novel conveys a sense of Professor St. Peters individual map of Paris. During the period when he had been living in the town of Versailles and tutoring the Thierault boys, he takes an early train into Paris, breakfasts on the rue de Vaugirard (map #15), and goes for a walk. The portrait of the city which follows is not one that is likely to appear in any guidebook: its November, its rainy, and shops arent even open yet. But it is personal to St. Peter, and Cather renders it beautifully: The sky was of such an intense silvery grey that all the grey stone buildings along the Rue St. Jacques and the Rue Soufflot came out in that silver shine stronger than in sunlight. The shop windows were shut; on the bleak ascent to the Pantheon there was not a spot of colour, nothing but wet, shiny, quick-silvery grey, accented by black crevices, and weather-worn bosses white as wood-ash. (101) the one bouquet he has purchased. (He attempts to give it to a passing schoolgirl, but is prevented by a disapproving nun who accompanies the group of girls.) Paris appears only occasionally in The Professors House; this is the scene which Cather develops in greatest detail. It demonstrates her subtle treatment of places: in creating St. Peters recollections of Paris, Cather does not choose the obvious tourist sites or depict what we might call obvious weather, but instead renders a beautiful, unexpected, and individual moment in the life of this particular character. This happy, silver-grey morning in St. Peters life recalls a passage from Cathers description of the small town of Le Lavandou in her 1902 travelogue: there is always one place remembered above the rest because the external or internal conditions were such that they most nearly produced happiness (Willa Cather in Europe 157). Or, as Tom Outland says on the Blue Mesa, Happiness is something you cant explain (252). Cather tells us it is bleak; the dominant color is greyone of the things the soldiers in One of Ours dislike about Rouen. But in her word-painting, the grey becomes a beautiful shiny, In some ways it is also difficult quick-silvery color, the palette of many to explain why the dahlia scene in classic black-and-white photographs The Professors House matters, or of Paris, including a view of the A postcard from Cather to her nephew Charles Cather, showing a its effect in the novel as a whole: it Pantheon by Eugne Atget, taken from flower seller at the Church of the Madeleine in Paris. Archives & Special Collections, University of NebraskaLincoln Libraries. seems isolated, simply a beautiful an intersection very close to the one Cather mentions (see photograph on moment St. Peter remembers page 7). St. Peters individual map of Paris is evocative, but also vividly years later. Yet the moments profound visual beauty very precise: the text pinpoints a particular corner between the freezes a moment in time, to borrow a phrase from The Song Luxembourg Gardens and the Pantheon (map #16). Into this of the Lark. This painterly moment is distinctive, far from the beautiful monochromatic palette Cather then adds color: All clich view of Paris, and accurate as well as beautiful: the critic at once, from somewhere behind the Pantheon itself, a man and Michel Gervaud remarks that Cathers description capture[s] woman, pushing a hand-cart, came into the empty street. The the atmosphere of Paris in late fall, the quality of the Ile-decart was full of pink dahlias (101). Although the couple are a France light which brings out the brightness of the pink weary, anxious-looking pair, their flowers, which were done dahlias (76). The scene also resonates with emotional and up in large bouquets with fresh green chestnut-leaves (102) are moral beauty. One of the most troubling undercurrents in The beautiful. St. Peter buys a bunch, struck by the beauty of brilliant Professors House has to do with moneynot with poverty, but pink-and-green bunches of flowers in their silvery setting, as with affluence. The fortune which Louie Marsellus has made well as the courage of the young couple, traveling with a baby by turning Tom Outlands scientific formula into a marketable to Paris in the early morning hours to make a few francs. Poor commodity provides some happiness to the St. Peter family as he is himself, St. Peter willingly pays two-and-a-half francs especially to Mrs. St. Peter, Rosamond, and Louie himself. Yet for the flowers, even though he hardly knows what to do with it has also caused profound strife: between Rosamond and her 8 Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 sister Kathleen, and between the Marselluses and Professor Cranes family, among others. And of course the source of the rift between Tom and his friend Roddy Blake was Roddys sale of the artifacts he and Tom had excavated from the Blue Mesa. In contrast, the dahlia scene quietly demonstrates the unimportance of money, or at least of affluence. The young Godfrey St. Peter, poor as he is, has had enough money for his train ticket to and from Paris, for a magnificent breakfast (101), and to purchase what we might call gratuitous, splendidly useless beauty; he returns to Versailles with nothing but his return ticket in his pocket (103). In some ways this small, beautiful scene serves as a meditation on the relation, or perhaps the lack of relation, between wealth on one hand, and happiness and beauty on the other. In an earlier passage in the novel, readers are told that by doing without many so-called necessities [St. Peter] had managed to have his luxuries (27), and this scene is a persuasive demonstration of that. St. Peter tells Lillian that If with that cheque [from the Oxford prize] I could have bought back the fun I had writing my history, youd never have got your house. But one couldnt get that for twenty thousand dollars. The great pleasures dont come so cheap (34). The great pleasures, the pink dahlias surely among them, have little to do with anything as common or cheap as currency. In a later scene, another part of St. Peters individual map of Paris comes into focus: the Luxembourg Gardens. It was here that Cather was photographed in her fur stole in 1920 (see adjacent photograph; map #17); those photos were taken in the most recognizable part of the Gardens, with the pool and the Luxembourg Palace behind (just a short distance from the scene at the corner of rue Sufflot and rue St. Jacques). This is one of the most recognizable areas of the Gardens; the pool and the palace appear in At the Luxembourg Gardens, 1920. Southwick various guidebooks Collection, Archives & Special Collections, and photographs, University of NebraskaLincoln Libraries. www.WillaCather.org John Singer Sargent: In the Luxembourg Gardens, 1879; Philadelphia Museum of Art. In a second version of this painting, Luxembourg Gardens at Twilight, Sargent included the dome of the Panthon in its appropriate spot in the middle distance. A print of that painting was placed in the copy of Alexanders Bridge that Cather inscribed to Isabelle McClung. and as the setting of John Singer Sargents In the Luxembourg Gardens (see illustration above). There are other well-known views of the Gardens, including the long alle of pollarded trees, the Medici Fountain, and other locations. Cather chooses none of these more obvious parts of the Gardens for Professor St. Peter to ponder. Instead, she has him think of the monument to Eugene Delacroix (17981863; see photographs on page 10), an important French Romantic painter, the creator of the iconic Liberty Leading the People and many other canvases. Although the monument is located near the Luxembourg Museum and close to the often-photographed palace and pool (map #18), it is easy to overlook. Yet it is one of the sights St. Peter would have wanted to show Tom had he ever been able to visit the city with him, as the two of them had planned: He had wanted . . . to go with him some autumn morning to the Luxembourg Gardens, when the yellow horse-chestnuts were bright and bitter after rain; to stand with him before the monument to Delacroix and watch the sun gleam on the bronze figuresTime, bearing away the youth who was struggling to snatch his palmor was it to lay a palm? Not that it mattered. It might have mattered to Tom, had not chance, in one great catastrophe, swept away all youth and all palms, and almost Time itself. (26061) Cathers use of the monument has at least two fundamental interpretations. In one, Time is lifting Fame, a female figure in the sculpture, to lay the palm of artistic achievement for Delacroix, while Apollo applauds (Maquette). In the other, 9 there is a struggle: Apollo, champion of art, in the lower right, applauds, while Timewho is also, of course, Deathstrains to prevent the palm from being awarded, an allegory conveying the idea that the desire to achieve the glory of fame is always a race against time and death. Cathers description of the monument accords with the second, agonistic reading: the female figure is turned into a male youth attempting either to award or to snatch a palm before it is too late. St. Peters reflection on the sculpture, particularly as he thinks of it relative to Toms fate, ends on a grim note of failure, with Death sweeping away both Toms youth and his chance at the palm of glorysomething he is awarded only posthumously. By the time Tom has received that glorythat is, by the time he is elevated to the status of the inventor of the Outland engine (42)he is, as Scott McGregor says, reduced to a glittering idea (110). Near the end of the novel, the Professor wonders if he will ever return to Paris, and imagines driv[ing] up in front of Notre Dame . . . and see[ing] it standing there like the Rock of Ages, with the frail generations breaking about its base (270; map #19). St. Peter imagines the great cathedral through his own lens: his view of Notre Dame is shaped both by his ocean voyages (the image suggests waves breaking against a cliff ) and by his unresolved grief over the death of Tom Outland, one of those frail human beings broken in the Great War. The sentences immediately following this passage suggest St. Peters underlying thoughts of Tom: St. Peter recollects that He hadnt seen it [Notre Dame] since the war and then reflects that if he went anywhere next summer . . . it would be down into Outlands country, to watch the sunrise break on the sculptured peaks (270). The war recalls Outlands death in France; Outlands country recalls his life in the Southwest. St. Peter has declined a trip to Paris because, although he loves the city, he feels that it is too beautiful, and too full of memories (162)including, paradoxically, 10 the memory of the trip there that he never got to take with Tom. The thing not named, St. Peters profound grief over Toms death, hovers over his perception of the great cathedral. Cathers pairing of Notre Dame and the Southwest in St. Peter, moreover, documents her own unusual range of geographic familiarity, and her ability to pair seemingly disparate locations in a single image. St. Peters Paris is in some ways a sad place, but it is also a beautiful place; the Paris of Euclide Auclair in Shadows on the Rock differs significantly. Places exist in time as well as in space, and Auclairs Paris the Paris of Louis XIV, the Sun Kingis not only smaller but less benevolent than the city St. Peter (and Cather) experienced. Cather researched Paris in the seventeenth century carefully. Not only did she consult historical texts; she also, during her 1930 trip to France, followed the trail of Count Frontenac in Paris, visited sites she would describe in the novel, and studied the citys history at the Muse Carnavalet (Lewis 158; map #20). Auclairs Paris is initially a quiet one; as a little boy he believed he lived Aim-Jules Dalous Monument to Delacroix, 1890; Luxembourg Gardens. Top photo by Philippe/Creative Commons. Bottom photo (detail) by Warren Olin-Ammentorp. Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 in a place where nothing ever changed (24). Yet it is not always a benevolent place. Although Cciles mother tells her that she must carry on the French heritage in the New World because the French are the most civilized people in Europe (32), Cciles father tells stories that suggest the opposite. Under the reign of Louis XIV, he had seen taxes grow more and more ruinous, poverty and hunger always increasing. People died of starvation in the streets of Paris, in his own parish of Saint-Paul, where there was so much wealth (40). Worst of all is the unjust death of an old man, Bichet, who is hanged because he takes two brass kettles from an abandoned house (10708). Your grandmother never got over it, Auclair tells Ccile; She said she had no wish to live longer in a world where such cruelties could happen (110). Although Auclair plans for many years to return to Paris, he never does; at the novels end he is reconciled to Quebec, a kinder world than the one he left. Paris of the 1930s, with its increased motor traffic and congestion, was less appealing to Cather than the city she had earlier visited; during her 1930 visit she wrote that Paris is almost as noisy and crowded as New York. It has changed woefully in seven years (Selected Letters 430). Yet she continued to enjoy many aspects of the city, including its connections to French literature, among them Victor Hugos Notre-Dame de Paris. During the 1930 trip, she wrote to her twin nieces, Margaret and Elizabeth, that she had climbed up to the tower of Notre Dame again and spent the morning among my old friends, the gargoyles (431). Her affection for the gargoyles is also reflected in a postcard of them which she sent; anticipating Disneys 1996 animated adaptation of The Hunchback by several decades, she remarked, I am sure all the figures were Quasimodos playfellows, and that he had special friends among them (429). On another postcard of the cathedral, she wrote, I have often walked about the high parapet from which Quasimodo threw the priest (419). Her matter-of-fact statement suggests that the novel was just as real an event to her as the fall of the Bastille, which she also mentions to her nieces (431). Cathers individual map of Paris was personal, cultural, and literaryand central to her imagination throughout her life. l Acknowledgements: My work on this paper was made much easier thanks to John Murphys Walking Tour from the 2007 Cather International Seminar and the Willa Cather Geochronology at the Willa Cather Archive. Thanks to Warren Olin-Ammentorp for discussion of the Delacroix monument and for the reference to the Dalou article. www.WillaCather.org WORKS CITED Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 19001940. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. Brown, E. K. Willa Cather: A Critical Biography. 1953. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987. Cather, Willa. April Twilights and Other Poems. Ed. Robert Thacker. New York: Knopf, 2013. . Death Comes for the Archbishop. 1927. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. John J. Murphy, Charles W. Mignon, Frederick M. Link, and Kari A. Ronning. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. .Lucy Gayheart. 1935. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. David Porter, Kari Ronning, and Frederick M. Link. U of Nebraska P, 2015. . The Mills of Montmartre. April Twilights and Other Poems. 6667. . Paris. April Twilights and Other Poems. 108. . The Professors House. 1925. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. James Woodress, Kari Ronning, and Frederick M. Link. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002. . The Selected Letters of Willa Cather. Ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout. New York: Knopf, 2013. . Shadows on the Rock. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. John J. Murphy, David Stouck, and Frederick M. Link. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2005. . Then Back to Ancient France Again. April Twilights and Other Poems. 42. . Willa Cather in Europe. Ed. George N. Kates. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1956. Gervaud, Michel. Willa Cather and France: Elective Affinities. The Art of Willa Cather. Ed. Bernice Slote and Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1974. 6581. Gopnick, Adam. Introduction. Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology. New York: Library of America, 2004. xiiixxxiii. Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. 1953. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1976. McCullough, David. The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011. Maquette for the Delacroix Monument by Aim-Jules Dalou. Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH. Oct. 28, 2014. Web. Wharton, Edith. French Ways and Their Meaning. New York: Appleton, 1919. Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987. 11 Willa Cather and the Art of Recoverable Contexts: Source Materials for One of Ours Richard C. Harris | Webb Institute Guess how I made the bulls head? One day, in a pile of objects all jumbled together, I found an old bicycle seat right next to a rusty set of handlebars. In a flash, they joined together in my head. The idea of the bulls head came to me before I had a chance to think. All I did was to weld them together . . . [but] if you were to see the bulls head and not the bicycle seat and handlebars that form it, the sculpture would lose some of its impact. to nineteenth-century masters, such as Millet and Puvis de Chavannes. Cather had available to her an enviable body of knowledge upon which she could draw when creating her narratives, and she suggested, referred to, or appropriated these and countless other sources throughout her works.2 A lesser known work of significance to Cather was J. W. N. Sullivans Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Cathers own publisher, in 1927. In an undated Pablo Picasso 1943 letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher probably written around 1930 (held in Cather biographer James Woodress the Bailey/Howe Library, University remarked over two decades ago that Pablo Picasso: Bulls Head, 1942; Muse Picasso. of Vermont), Cather enthusiastically Willa Cather was perhaps the best Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), 1 praised Sullivans study of Beethoven educated novelist of her generation. New York. Photo: Batrice Hatala, RMN-Grand Palais/ and urged Fisher, if she hadnt read it, Art Resource, NY. The transcript for classes she took while For goodness sakes, do! Cather told a student at the University of Nebraska Fisher it was the best book she had ever read about the process of in the 1890s indicates an impressively well-rounded liberal artistic creativity. One passage in particular on the artistic, creative education, especially strong in history, literature, and languages. process must especially have struck her: (Math evidently was not a strength: she earned, or was given, a grade designated Passed in an introductory math course in the Numberless experiences extending over several years are spring semester of her senior year.) Certainly, Cathers reviews gradually coordinated in the unconscious mind of the and other articles written for the Nebraska State Journal in the artist, and the total synthetic whole finds expression, mid-1890s and later in the decade for publications in Pittsburgh it may be, on some particular occasion. Even with reveal a young woman who was astonishingly well read and well poetry, which often professes to have its origin in some informed in the artistic fields of literature, drama, painting, and particular occasion, the poem is never the effect of music. Her work at McClures Magazine from 1906 to 1912 the particular occasion acting on some kind of tabula expanded her knowledge of these areas, and her correspondence rasa. The experience of the particular occasion finds its throughout her life makes it clear that her passionate pursuit of place within the context, although the impact of the knowledge never waned. experience may have been necessary to bring this context to the surface. A genius may be defined as [one] who is The breadth and depth of her knowledge was, of course, exceptionally rich in recoverable contexts. (85) fundamental to the fiction she wrote. Her works are filled with allusions and references to the arts: literature of the great tradition from the Bible and the ancient Greeks to nineteenth-century giants such as Tolstoy, Turgenev, Flaubert, Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray; the music of Wagner, Schubert, Beethoven, and other major composers; and painting, from Renaissance Tuscan artists 12 One familiar with Cathers comments about the way in which a number of her works initially sprang to life in her imagination might note the similar way in which this process worked for her. A Lost Lady and Death Comes for the Archbishop provide two especially striking examples. In 1945 Cather told her friend Irene Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 Miner Weisz that immediately after reading an obituary piece on the death of Lyra Garber, the charming Red Cloud resident whom Cather had known when she was a young girl, she had retired to a place by herself and emerged an hour or so later, with the whole novel in her head (Selected Letters 643). It was a story, she also indicated, that had teased her for twenty years. It had taken shape in a kind of catalytic reaction as her memories of this woman, as well as connections, both literary and musical among them the Bible, Shakespeare, Turgenev, and Schubert came together. Similarly, several years later having found the prototypes for the two main characters for Death Comes for the Archbishop, and having decided to write of the lives of her two religious figures in a crude frontier society, Cather read extensively about the history and geography of the American Southwest, the missionary experience there, and the fundamental aspects of Catholicism (Murphy 342). (See Lewis 139 and Cathers letter to the editor of The Commonweal, Willa Cather on Writing 313.) But, again, the initial idea for her novel was developed, was given a sort of musical texture, as Cather drew upon her remarkable store of recoverable contexts. As John Murphy points out in the Historical Essay to the Scholarly Edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop, works that Cather had read previouslyJohn Bunyans The Pilgrims Progress, the Bible, the Iliad, and works by Dante, Virgil, and Ovidmost significantly contributed to the Archbishops allusive language (339). l Cathers extensive use of recoverable contexts in her writing raises some interesting questions about the role of source material and influences in her fiction. Harold Bloom devotes considerable intellect to what he calls the anxiety of influence in his 1967 study by that name. (A revised edition was issued in 1973.) His focus there is on the ways in which the works of previous writers (his focus is on poets) may negatively affect, in some cases stifle, the individual creativity of those poets who succeed them. Cather clearly suffered no such anxiety. As noted in the brief discussion above, for her influencesthat is, material drawn from the literary, musical, and artistic works of those who had gone before her, were not only a positive but also an essential element in the creation of her mature fiction. For her the creative process was not stifled by but rather was enriched by the associations and connections that she could draw upon, from what her early mentor Henry James (in typical Jamesean fashion) termed a deep well of unconscious cerebration (Preface to The American 23). In placing Cathers use of recoverable contexts in a broader imaginative or artistic context, we would better turn from Bloom to John Livingston Lowess great study of Coleridges The Rime of www.WillaCather.org the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, The Road to Xanadu. In his 1985 foreword to the Princeton University Press edition of the work, Thomas McFarland declares, No other work of American scholarship has ever quite had the impact of The Road to Xanadu. When it appeared in 1927, the intellectual public was dazzled (ix). Two comments from critical reviews will suffice to illustrate the point. One reviewer called Lowess work, as thorough a piece of productive scholarship as has been done in America, and added that Germany, where research into matters scholarly was invented, has little to show to surpass Professor Lowess book in mastership of every possible detail. The reviewer for the New York Herald declared it a masterpiece of what the French call le critique de gnsethat is, of that class of criticism which deals with the sources of a work of literature (both quoted in McFarland [ix]). The subtitle of Lowess book is A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. In his preface to The Road to Xanadu, he notes that he wants to be quite clear about his intention: This is not a study of Coleridges theory of the imagination. It is an attempt to get at the workings of the faculty itself (xxii). Some pages later he describes in great detail how this creative process works: The deep well of unconscious cerebration underlies your consciousness and mine, but in the case of genius its waters are possessed of a peculiar potency. Images and impressions converge and blend even in the sleepy drench of our forgetful pools. But the inscrutable energy of genius which we call creative owes its secret virtue at least in part to the enhanced and almost incredible facility with which in the wonder-working depths of the unconscious the fragments which sink incessantly below the surface fuse and assimilate and coalesce. . . . it is again conscious energy, now of another and loftier type, which later drags the deeps for their submerged treasure, and molds the bewildering chaos into unity. But interposed between consciousness and consciousness is the well. (5556) In her comments on how Cathers creative mind worked, Edith Lewis describes a very similar process: Although she did not plan the actual content of a novel beforehand, I believe one could say that she lived a great deal with her idea. . . . During the time she was not writing, or engaged with something else, I think she was very much preoccupied with the past out of which her story sprang; not actively trying to construct anything, but surrendering herself to memories, impressions, experiences, that lay submerged in her consciousness; letting them come to the surface, and relate themselves to the theme of her narrative. (127) l 13 Whatever readers of One of Ours may Having noted the way in which think about her treatment of the fictional Cathers creative imagination often Claude Wheelers feelings about his war worked, let us look at One of Ours, a experience, Cathers depiction of those work in which the contextual material feelings is valid. They are drawn directly Cather drew upon was particularly rich from G. P.s letters; in some cases, in fact, and varied. One of Ours, set in large part she comes very close to quoting directly during World War I, will doubtless be from them. among the works reexamined in the next several years as historians and literary On the basis of her conversations critics once again debate the validity or with G. P., her knowledge of at least some of the disappointments (his authenticity of her depiction of the term) he had suffered, and her reading of war experience of her central character, his letters home, Cather felt haunted by, Claude Wheeler. The focus here, compelled, driven, to write the story of a however, is not so much on what Cather red-headed prairie boy butting his way says about war and that war in particular through the world, searching desperately in One of Ours, but rather on how she for something splendid that would created the novel she did. This paper, Before his service in the American Expeditionary Force, give his life some kind of authenticity G. P. Cather served briefly in the U. S. Navy. While then, concerns itself with the creative stationed on the U.S.S. West Virginia in 1908, he sent this (Mahoney 39). process involved in the writing of One of post card to Myrtle Bartlett, whom he would marry in Ours, the way in which Cather drew upon As many reviewers noted at the time 1910. From the archive of the Willa Cather Foundation. of the publication of One of Ours, in what she knew about life in Nebraska, Book I through Book III of the novel, those sections set in the molded that material, informed herself about the war, drew upon Midwest, Cather was on home ground. The writing clearly reflects a store of both high brow art and popular culture and used this her intimate knowledge of the area and the people she describes, contextual material in creating her novel, i.e., the focus here, to use and at the same time reflects her concern with American values Lowess phrase, is on the workings of the [creative] faculty itself. during this period. This material is developed in conjunction with The idea for the novel began with the death of her cousin the Wheeler familys discovery of what is happening in Europe G. P. Cather at Cantigny on May 28, 1918; a member of the as the war begins. Claude, for example, goes out to buy the latest American Expeditionary Force, he was killed in action in the edition of the newspaper, so his family can have the most current first major engagement of American soldiers in the war. In many report on the war; in another instance, he grabs a volume of the ways it is rather curious that G. P.s life and death should have encyclopedia to read about the defenses around Paris. Cather here fascinated Willa Cather to the point that it did. Unlike Willa quotes verbatim from the article on Paris that appears in the 1911 Cather, who had escaped the cornfields of Nebraska (see Cather edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (227228). In addition, to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Selected Letters 150) and had in these early sections of the novel, Cathers text shows evidence become a very successful and celebrated writer in New York, G. P. of her borrowing material or ideas from several contemporary Cather had remained in Nebraska and had been, quite frankly, writers, most obviously from Vachel Lindsays 1919 poem a loser: until the time he joined the US Army in 1916, almost Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, from which she took the epigraph everything he did had turned out poorly, in most cases because for the novel and the title for Book V, and also Edith Whartons of his own incompetence, irresponsibility, or carelessness. Ethan Frome, which Elizabeth Sergeant notes she and Cather The bumbling way in which he had mismanaged his life to had discussed shortly after its publication in 1911 (7273), as that point must have disturbed Cather, but at the same time she well as Sherwood Andersons Winesburg, Ohio, which was also obviously felt a certain sense of compassion for this young man published in 1919. Her description of an unprecedented power who so desperately desired to do something splendid and whose of destruction [that] had broken loose in the world (225226) life, in fact, had been transformed by his military experience. She strongly echoes Yeatss line, And what rough beast, its hour come noted that she felt a great sense of pride when she learned of his round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? from his having earned a commendation for valor several weeks before his poem The Second Coming, which first appeared in 1920. death. Returning to Nebraska several months after G. P.s death, Cather visited his mother, her beloved Aunt Franc, and read G. P.s letters home, written in the fall of 1917 and the spring of 1918. 14 The contextual material in this section also includes the popular culture of the period: specific references to automobiles, Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 movies, music, fashions, college football, health and health food fads, China and the China missions, the temperance and womens rights movements. In addition, Cather refers to contemporary newspaper and magazine articles, incorporating, for example, information on the life, trial, and execution of Joan of Arc published in connection with her widely reported 1920 canonization; comments about ex-President Theodore Roosevelt, who died in 1919; and details from Ida Tarbells muckraking articles for McClures Magazine. With Book IV, however, Cather was on tenuous ground. Having moved Claude to Hoboken, New Jersey, his point of departure for Europe, she now had to get him to France. With no previously known material to draw upon, she simply borrowed what she needed from two contemporary sources. The firstperson account of Doctor Frederick Sweeney, discovered when Cather saw the physician in New Hampshire and learned that he had kept a diary recounting his voyage on a troopship to France in 1918, proved quite valuable. Cather evidently pestered the doctor until he finally agreed to let her read it. His surprise and apparent displeasure at her having used material from it without his permission, was answered by Cathers declaring, But I had Claude in Hoboken and had to get him to France! (Bean 45). Joseph Husbands A Year in the Navy, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1920, a copy of which Cather requested and received from her editor Ferris Greenslet, also proved very useful. Cather, in fact, clearly lifted a number of passages from Husbands book and after a bit of polishing up, simply inserted them in her novel.3 The greatest creative challenge Cather faced in writing One of Ours, however, was Book V. She had spent six weeks in France in 1902. In 1920, after a year and a half working on the book, Cather felt she had to return to France in order to again experience French culture firsthand, to see what the battlefields in the devastated parts of France looked like (Lewis 12021), and to find her cousins grave. When she returned to New York, she talked with dozens of veterans about their experiences, thoughts, and feelings. She wanted to immerse herself in the subject of the war. Elizabeth Sergeant recounts a May 1919 meeting for tea with Cather in Central Park: . . . she was greatly involved in her soldier book, so greatly that one cup of tea had scarce been drunk before her questions started. She wanted to know, with that eye-in-every-pore quality that took possession of her, when she was bent on her own ends (155). Cather clearly read many of the books that were published during and immediately after the end of the war, almost certainly among them Henri Barbusses Le Feu (Under Fire), which by 1918 was recognized as the greatest French novel on the war, as well as Dorothy Canfield Fishers Home Fires in France (1918) and The Day of Glory (1919) (Stout 50). She also read a number of memoirs and accounts of the war that became available during www.WillaCather.org and immediately after the war, no doubt among them Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.s Average Americans; Roosevelt was G. P. Cathers commanding officer, and his book includes a photograph of G. P. and other officers who served under his command, as well as a comment on G. P. And Cather drew heavily upon the newspaper accounts she had read about the events in Europe. In letters to Dorothy Canfield Fisher in early 1922, Cather acknowledged reservations about the misfortune of having to use this material to develop her story, but she added that Claudes story was so mixed up with journalism and public events, external events, that she had little choice but to do so (Selected Letters 31114). Nevertheless, in writing of the role of the war in the lives of various characters in the novel, Cathers remarkable memory was certainly invaluable. Major events such as the initial German march through Belgium, the sinking of the Lusitania, the execution of Edith Cavell, and war news concerning action on the Western Front at places such as Verdun, Ypres, Passchendaele, and Belleau Wood became essential to her narrative. Other newspaper articles also provided material: stories about air combat contributed to Cathers development of the character Victor Morse and the curious incident involving a woman pilot shot down over the battlefield. In Chapter VIII of Book V of the novel, soldiers engage in small talk about various subjects: one soldiers mail from home includes a clipping about the discovery of the site of the original Garden of Eden; another soldier mentions that before the war he was working on a dam in Spain that would become the largest dam in the world, and in the course of excavation had come across the ruins of one of Julius Caesars camps. All these incidents are based on actual newspaper accounts that Cather had read during, or in some cases in the years before the war, and certainly well before she began work on her novel in the late fall of 1918. Most importantly, however, Cather had available her impressive knowledge of the great tradition of Western, that is, European and American, literature. References to these works are handled with an ease that illustrates how comfortable Cather was with her knowledge of them. In One of Ours there are almost twenty references to biblical stories and passages, as well as several references to classical myth. The following list of authors directly referred to or alluded to in One of Ours demonstrates the impressive wealth of knowledge she had to draw upon: Bourget, Bulwer-Lytton, Bunyan, Byron, Cervantes, Chekhov, Defoe, Dickens, Dryden, Gibbon, Heine, Homer, Horace, Longfellow, Michelet, Milton, Plato, Seeger, Shakespeare, Shelley, Stevenson, Tennyson, and Voltaire. We can add to that list of literary works mention of Franz Schuberts lieder, Felix Mendelssohns Songs without Words, Camille Saint-Sanss Violin Concerto No. 3, Jules Massenets Mditation from Thas and a suggestion of Richard Wagners 15 Parsifal. And lest we forget the painters, references to Flemish and Tuscan art. One of the most striking points about this vast array of materials is the broad range of recoverable contexts from which Cather borrowed: A novel that subtly suggests that its main character is reminiscent of Wagners Parsifal (see Cather to Orrick Johns, Selected Letters 328) also compares that character to Collodis Pinocchio (One of Ours 147). Let us conclude, then, by comparing comments made by young Willa Cather, the journalist, with those of the older Cather, the mature and very accomplished writer of fiction. In the Spring 2014 issue of the Willa Cather Newsletter & Review, Marvin Friedman notes that in an 1895 article Cather declared that there was something especially wonderful about a new work of art, an absolutely new creation, a new work that did not exist yesterday, that has been called up out of nothingness [italics mine] and that henceforth will be a part of the art of the world (The World and the Parish 179). Decades later the more mature and experienced Cather certainly did not see her fiction as having been called up out of nothingness, or as J. W. N. Sullivan said, created on a tabula rasa. Your memories are like the colors in paints, she told Flora Merrill in 1925, but you must arrange them (Willa Cather in Person 77). Cather told Irene Miner Weisz in early 1945 that she knew some of her readers sit around and do fine detective work on where she got this, and where she got that. I could tell you in confidence, Irene, that so often I do not remember at all where I got them. After ntonia was published, Father pointed out to me half a dozen incidentsthings I had seen or done with him (the two crazy Russians, etc.), and I honestly believed that I had invented them. They simply came into my mind, the way things do come when one is interested. When one is writing hard, ones drives toward the main episodes and the detail takes care of itself. Unless the detail is spontaneous, unsought for by the writer, he isnt much of a writer has mistaken his job. (Selected Letters 64243) And in an April 29, 1945, letter to Carrie Miner Sherwood, Cather declared, I do not so much invent as I remember and re-arrange (647). Finally, let us return to Lowes. In the concluding chapter to The Road to Xanadu, he asserts that the imagination never operates in a vacuum. Its stuff is always fact of some order, somehow experienced; its product is that fact transmuted (390). He continues, Where, indeed, at any given instant, are all the countless facts we know, and all the million scenes we have experienced? Whatever that shadowy limbo may be, these were. The Well is only a convenient symbol for a mystery. And 16 there they had lain . . . to all intents and purposes in utter nonexistenceasleep, some for weeks, some for months, and some for a period of years. Then, all at once, they awoke. . . . A definite impetus struck had down into the Well and set the sleeping images in motion. And then they emerged, they were linked in new and sometimes astonishing combinations (393). Cathers correspondence in the period around the publication of One of Ours indicates that she was well aware of the artistic danger of relying too much on facts, i.e., using a journalistic process and incorporating external events as she had done in parts of Book V of her novel. She repeated this notion in her 1922 essay The Novel Dmeubl: If the novel is a form of imaginative art, it cannot be at the same time a vivid and brilliant form of journalism. Out of the teeming, gleaming stream of the present it must select the eternal material of art (40). Claude Wheelers story, she had hoped, would rise above the external events surrounding her main characters rather quixotic quest to make something splendid of his life. One of Ours, though certainly not Cathers best work, is, nonetheless, one of the more remarkable of her works in terms of the wide range of contextual material that went into its making. In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, published three years before the appearance of One of Ours, T. S. Eliot defines tradition in terms of the possibility of a positive relationship that can exist between the works of previous writers and those of the present. Unlike Bloom, who explores the anxiety new writers may experience when confronting the works of their predecessors, especially as those works may inhibit or compromise the newer writers work, Eliot sees tradition not as a deterrent or detriment to novelty but rather as an integral part of a creative process that synthesizes old and new. In his description of how the creative mind often works, he cautions those who would dismiss an artists using previously available material in his own work: the most individual parts of his work, he asserts, may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean in the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity (4). Later in the century Claude Levi-Strauss would speak of bricolage, simply speaking, tinkering, the creative process by which an artist might use available material in the process of creating something new, as Picasso in a sense did in creating his iconic bulls head. In One of Ours Cather used a wide variety of sources drawn from a deep well of both conscious and subconscious material, as well as a sophisticated bit of tinkering with contemporary culture and events. Despite its flaws, the novel provides a fascinating insight into what Bernice Slote long ago referred to as Cathers fierce intelligence and comprehensive knowledge (9) and represents one of the most interesting examples of her creative mind at work. Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 NOTES 1. Concluding comments at the 5th International Willa Cather Seminar. Hastings, Nebraska, 1993. 2. Cather had not only read works in this great tradition; she knew many of these works remarkably well. For example, she certainly read Thackerays Henry Esmond, which she referred to as her old friend, numerous times throughout her life. In a 1922 letter, she told H. L. Mencken that she had discovered Tolstoys four shorter novels when she was fourteen and that for about three years I read them all the time, backward and forward (Selected Letters 309). She informed her brother Roscoe in the fall of 1941 that she had six copies of Shakespeares sonnets, that she had memorized most of them years before, and that she always carried a copy with her, so she could look up a line if she forgot it (Selected Letters 607). In addition, she read Bunyans The Pilgrims Progress eight times during one of her early winters in Nebraska (Lewis 14); she read Flauberts Salammb thirteen times (letter to Alfred A. Knopf, March 14, 1945); and Twains Huckleberry Finn about twenty times by the mid-1930s (Woodress 51). 3. See my article on this subject, Getting Claude Over There: Sources for Book Four of One of Ours. WORKS CITED Bean, Margaret C. Willa Cather and Dr. Sweeney. New Hampshire Profiles. August 1974: 4445. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Cather, Willa. Letter to Alfred A. Knopf. March 14, 1945. CatherKnopf Correspondence, Barbara Dobkin Collection. New York. . Letter to Carrie Miner Sherwood. April 29 [1945]. Selected Letters. 64648. . Letter to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. April 20 [1912]. Selected Letters. 15052. . Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher. N.d. [probably c. 1930]. Dorothy Canfield Fisher Collection. Bailey/Howe Library. University of Vermont. Burlington. . On Death Comes for the Archbishop. Letter to the editor of The Commonweal. Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art. 1949. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988. 313. . Letter to H. L. Mencken. February 6 [1922]. Selected Letters. 30810. . Letter to Irene Miner Weisz. January 6, 1945. Selected Letters. 64143. www.WillaCather.org . Letter to Orrick Johns. November 17, 1922. Selected Letters. 328. . One of Ours. 1922. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. Richard C. Harris, Frederick M. Link, and Kari A. Roning. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2006. . The Selected Letters of Willa Cather. Ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout. New York: Knopf, 2013. . Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters. Ed. L. Brent Bohlke. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986. Eliot, T. S. Tradition and the Individual Talent. T. S. Eliot: Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950. 311. Friedman, Marvin. Pauls Case, the Opera: A Study in Temperament Comes to the Stage. Willa Cather Newsletter & Review. Spring 2014: 1822. Harris, Richard C. Getting Claude Over There: Sources for Book Four of One of Ours. Journal of Narrative Theory. Summer 2005: 24856. James, Henry. Preface to The American. The Art of the Novel. Ed. Richard P. Blackmur. New York: Scribners, 1937. 2039. Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953. Lowes, John Livingston. The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986. McFarland, Thomas. John Livingston Lowes and Coleridges Poems. Foreword. The Road to Xanadu: A Study on the Ways of the Imagination. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986. ixxviii. Mahoney, Eva. How Willa Cather Found Herself. Willa Cather in Person. 3339. Merrill, Flora. A Short Story Course Can Only Delay, It Cannot Kill an Artist, Says Willa Cather. Willa Cather in Person. 7380. Murphy, John J. Historical Essay. Death Comes for the Archbishop. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. John J. Murphy, Charles W. Mignon, Frederick M. Link, and Kari A. Ronning. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. 32571. Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley. Willa Cather: A Memoir. 1953. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1963. Slote, Bernice. Willa Cather: The Secret Web. Five Essays on Willa Cather The Merrimack Symposium. North Andover: Merrimack College, 1974. 119. Stout, Janis. The Making of Willa Cathers One of Ours: The Role of Dorothy Canfield Fisher. War, Literature, and the Arts 2.2 (1999): 4859. Sullivan, J. W. N. Beethoven: His Spiritual Development. New York: Random House, 1960. Woodress, James. Willa Cather. A Literary Life. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987. 17 Becoming Cosmopolitan: The European Encounter with the New World in Death Comes Nalini Bhushan | Smith College for the Archbishop The ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes (404323 BCE) proposed a radical possibility for human contemplationthat of the kosmopolitsan individual who would conceivably have no particular affiliation to the habits, customs, laws or ways of thinking and feeling of his own province, city or polis. Instead and this was the revolutionary, perhaps impossible, thought the individuals only allegiance would be to the unspecified, undelineated, abstract cosmos. This is arguably the earliest predecessor of the more modern notion of the global citizen. In our own time, the notion of the cosmopolitan person (or global citizen) is less radical: a cultured person, usually a traveler, and one who chooses to travel to other countries and encounter cultures other than ones own. In this view, cosmopolitans would not The illustrations in this essay are by Harold von Schmidt, originally created for a special 1929 edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop. be required (and would perhaps even be unable) to shed their more familiar allegiances in favor of the unfamiliar; rather, they would be open to incorporating new experiences, ways of seeing and aesthetic sensibilities into their more familiar framework, and, perhaps to having that framework be transformed by those experiences (see Appiah and Rorty for differing opinions on this less radical version). In practice, the human history of cultural encounter has revealed just how difficult it is to be genuinely open to new, unfamiliar cultures. Nietzsches wonderfully phrased insight in the late nineteenth century was that we cannot look around our own corner (The Gay Science, section 374; 336). That would account in part for what we now recognize as the uneasy relation between cosmopolitanism and a form of imperialism or at minimum a parochialism: the would-be cosmopolitan cannot help both appreciating and judging a vastly different culture by the standards of her own culture, often resulting in a sense of the superiority of 18 her own. Is a measure of parochialism inevitable in our encounter with the other, or is a genuine cosmopolitanismnamely, one that does not favor ones own culturepossible? This is another way of asking whether Diogeness ancient radical idea can be realized. I am interested here in the possibility of the conversion of missionary to cosmopolitan or global citizen in this more radical sense, i.e., to one who belongs, not to a particular religion or country, but, and in some deeper sense, to the entire world. In her novel set in the American Southwest, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather explores the complexity of cross-cultural encounter through the social interactions, intense personal and moral doubts, and emerging aesthetic pleasures of her main protagonist, priest and well-traveled missionary Father Latour. In furthering this exploration, I examine the uneasy relation between imperialism and cosmopolitanism (Nussbaum 1997), between missionary zeal and cosmopolitan receptiveness, and between the so-called old and new worlds of Latours Europe and the North America of the peoples he is sent to serve (see also Stout and Goodman). I will argue that Cather shows us that the missionary may be productively viewed as an accidental cosmopolitan or citizen of the world. For while parochial (or even imperial) may be a more fitting description of the missionary as he begins his travels overseas, on the reasonable ground that the missionarys primary interest is a narrow anti-cosmopolitan one, namely, that of saving individual souls by conversion to his own religion of choice, the resulting experience of one who remains a missionary overseas can be transformative in unintended ways. I call this transformation becoming cosmopolitan. I am particularly interested in the role of otherness, the aesthetics of otherness, in this caseof other spaces and places, of other senses of time and of intimacyin effecting this transition in sensibility. At the same time, I am interested in Cathers sense of the limitations, of the boundaries, of the cosmopolitan sensibilities of the two priestsLatour and Vaillantin her novel. Encountering Otherness: The Missionary in the New World While the indigenous parish priest inhabits local places and encounters members of his parish in a familiar setting, the missionary priest is a traveler who expects to work in an unfamiliar setting, encountering unfamiliar places, climates, and peoples. The Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 two priests in the novelLatour and Vaillantare Frenchmen working in America, travelers to the New World with a complex missionary role. Father Latour, our main protagonist, by his own telling looks and acts like an American businessman by day, All day I am an American in speech and thought yes, in heart, too (Archbishop 37), but is liberated to feel and dress like a French priest by night. For a time their mission is narrow, to carry out specified church duties necessary to save Christian souls, through baptisms, confirmations, and marriage rites. Father Latour soon recognizes that in the New World he is at the same time assisting in the nation-building task of helping the local Mexicans and Indians become good Americans (37). In cultivating good Christians, he is simultaneously cultivating good American citizens. At the outset, both of Latours goals may be justifiably viewed as imperialist: to reform wayward Mexicans and convert heathens to his own (superior) religion and to transform unreliable citizenry into citizens in his own (Caucasian) image. Even at this juncture, however, we see a subtlety in his state of mind. Father Latour recognizes that his success in this complicated endeavor, curiously enough, depends in part on his not being American himself. As a Frenchman (and not part of a military establishment), Father Latour is an outsider trusted by the Mexicans and Native Americans. Outsider-ship is a quality they the Frenchman and the Mexicans and Native Americanshave in common. In addition, the ideological distance that is built into his outsider status as a non-American is reduced by his practical ability to speak Spanish. Fluency across languages gives one a passport to cross otherwise impassable borders (in Dutta and Robinson,1 an entry point into otherwise incommunicable forms of life; see also Wittgenstein). This is a position shared by both Fathers Latour and Vaillant and that gives them a privileged status as speakers in and on behalf of the community they happen to serve (Alcoff ). But Father Latour is different from Father Vaillant in at least two crucial respects that are relevant to the possibility of becoming cosmopolitan. First, he is receptive to beauty wherever it exists. He has, that is, a perceptive and imaginative eye, the hallmark of the cultured person. Second, despite the practical daily duties of the missionary, he lives a deeply intellectual life; the combination of the twothe imaginative and the intellectualgifts him, upon occasion, with a third eye, what I venture to call the eye of the seer, who takes the perspective of the cosmos. We glimpse this difference in sensibility between the two priests early in the novel, in the section entitled The Bell and the Miracle. When informed by Latour that the silver in the bell is indebted to Moorish design, Father Vaillant responds: What are you doing, Jean? Trying to make my bell out an infidel? And, when informed further about the history of the early bells and that the Angelus was really an adaptation of a Moslem custom (4748), Vaillant concludes his assessment that Latour has sullied the purity of the bell by this hybrid history. But Latour comes to the opposite conclusion, finding in this blended cultural and religious history of the bell something inspirational. In the novel Cather shows us that the encounter with otherness transforms both missionaries at the end of their respective lives, but in quite different ways. For in virtue of the differences that exist between the two men in aesthetic sensibility, character, skill, and capacity, Bishop Vaillant dies a great missionary priest, while Archbishop Latour dies a great cosmopolite, or citizen of the cosmos. In other words, Latour has the ingredients of sensibility and character that evoke from him that openness to the cosmos that approaches the radical idea of kosmopolits proposed by Diogenes. The Education of Father Latour: A Missionarys Existential Journey From Otherness to Openness Book Three of Cathers novel traces the contours of the interaction between Father Latour and Jacinto, his Indian guide from the Pecos pueblo, on their journey to visit Indian missions in the west. It documents a progression in understanding by Father Latour of the nature, character and ability of the pueblo Indian mind (in contrast with that of the nomadic Indian like www.WillaCather.org 19 Judgment Day (143)Latour responds that respect and honor of custom and traditions is an attitude that he himself shares as well with the Indians. the Navajo). Over time, Father Latours nave preconceptions and other manifestations of ignorance about Jacinto are erased, or at least muted, as a result of the interaction of the two. At the outset it is clear that Father Latour has little in common with Jacinto. The reader is aware of the Fathers paternalist, or imperialist, preconceptions: that Jacinto is illiterate, without opinions about much beyond his skill at being a guide, which he performs superbly. Those misconceptions are slowly corrected, opinions become more nuanced, beliefs changed. When Latour comments on an Indian name being pretty, for instance, Jacinto rejoins, Oh, Indians have nice names too!( 95), which suggests that Jacinto is, in fact, capable of a measure of feistiness, and of agency even, hitherto unknown to the Bishop. There is also a shift in his assessment of Jacintos level of literacy: Jacinto usually dropped the article in speaking Spanish, just as he did in speaking English, though the Bishop had noticed that when he did give a noun its article, he used the right one. The customary omission, therefore, seemed to be a matter of taste, not ignorance. In the Indian conception of language, such attachments were superfluous and unpleasing, perhaps (96). In these ways, an earlier assumption of a more hierarchical view of civilizations has given way to a more equalized sense of, and indeed respect for, difference: The Bishop seldom questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or beliefs. He didnt think it was polite, and he believed it to be useless. There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him (97). This is a key passage for my argument here. At this point, Latour neither attempts to read into Indian culture that of his own, nor does he denigrate it for its difference. This is evidence of that quality of openness to the other that is a mark of being cosmopolitan. By the end of Latours time together with Jacinto, there is a further attitudinal shift toward this different culture. When the trader Zeb Orchard expresses the familiar hierarchical view of cultural differencethat the things they value most are worth nothing to us. Theyve got their own superstitions, and their minds will go round and round in the same old ruts till 20 This attitude of valuing what is deeper than what is reflected on the surface demonstrates Father Latours grasp of a universal value underlying what may be great differences in cultural custom. At this stage in the novel, Father Latour not only has a fine appreciation of and respect for aesthetic and cultural differences (the swaddling of infants, the fire and snake stories that might explain the dwindling numbers of surviving Indian babies); he also sees the commonalities. Significantly, the commonalities he sees prevent him from concluding merely what the religious imperialist would: that these fundamentally other people have souls that need saving. Rather, his attitude is that of the moral cosmopolitanwith the conviction that those who seem fundamentally other are human with shared attitudes and values under quite different skin, culture and history. Becoming a Story: Citizens of the Land One attribute that distinguishes the individuals Father Latour finds most attractive in the New World and that link them together in his mind despite their differencesthe Anglo Kit Carson, and the Hispanic Don Manuel Chavez, for instanceis that these are self-made men, but by no ordinary process. They each have had encounters with radically different others, effectively forcing them out of the stasis of routine grounded in habit, custom, and the familiar, and consequently out of a more typical trajectory of human development. As a result, Father Latour reflects, each of these men not only had a story, but seemed to have become his story (192). One could at this juncture have focused on a quite different and problematic aspect of such a self-made man as Carson: specifically, on the tyranny of rugged individualism that asserts itself to the exclusion of social injustice. But my aim in this essay is to reconstruct Cathers account of Carsons (and Chavezs) emotive and perceptive capacity, not to judge the morality of their actions. In this connection, Latour observes: Those anxious, farseeing blue eyes of Carsons, to whom could they belong but to a scout and trailbreaker? (192). What is the difference between a person having a story and becoming a story? One might read into Father Latours reflection the following distinction between traveler-types. On the one hand, we imagine the traveler with whom we are most familiar, who travels to distant lands but retains her own familiar affiliations even as she consciously consumes and subsequently narrates the stories she has encountered along the way in her interactions with othersthis is a traveler who has a story. On the other hand, we might imagine another type of traveler; the traveler who, for a Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 number of contingencies not under her control, is forced out of her comfort zone for a sustained period of time and into a strange and unfamiliar world that she has to make her own in order to survive. For a certain kind of individual, this could have a transformative consequence, resulting in a visceral ability to feel at ease in vastly different places and spaces and with vastly different peoples. While it is an acquired skill, its acquisition takes place below the threshold of consciousness. These are trailbreakers who in effect have an unusually intimate relation to their storythey have become their story. In becoming a story, a self remains rooted to the earth that has occasioned the story, but the roots of this self are no longer singular or provincial, thus affording the self a liberation from the constraint of a particular custom, habit or language, a freedom to be at ease in many different contexts. Carson can move with ease between the Mexicans, Indians, Americans, and the French. So can Chavez. In sharp contrast, in Cathers telling, the typical traveler may travel to many lands and do business with Others, but lack this aspect of a cosmopolitan sensibility, namely, a first-person understanding of and ease with, and a sense of belonging, with unfamiliar others. I propose that Father Vaillant, too, belongs to this special breed of individual. He has the quality that Latour finds attractive in Carson and Chavez. Joseph Vaillant has of course willed the vocation that has thrust him into the life he now leads. Still, one could argue that he too becomes his story. About his years among the flock in Albuquerque, he exclaims, down there it is work for the heart, for a particular sympathy, and none of our new priests understand those poor natures as I do. I have almost become Mexican! I have learned to like chili colorado and mutton fat. Their foolish ways no longer offend me, and their very faults are dear to me. I am their man! (217). When he is given a new task to go to Denver, despite the fact that [o]f all the countries he knew, the desert and its yellow people were the dearest to him, the immersion in his chosen vocation enables him to take on this new assignment to an unfamiliar place and peoples, as it was the discipline of his life to break ties; to say farewell and move on into the unknown (260), and very soon he is wholly absorbed in his preparation for saving souls in the gold campsblind to everything else (265). The method of and capacity for willed immersionin his chosen vocation and, importantly, in local customs and habitsis Father Vaillants unique skill. It is intentional and self-conscious, driven by the goal that never eludes him: that of being a good missionary. This missionary, the boyhood friend of Father Latour, who dies apparently happily in Denver, becomes his story, the story of a great missionary in the New World, a world that he inhabits with ease and to which he belongs. He nevertheless remains a missionary at heart, and this prevents him from the possibility of that radical openness to which Diogenes refers. www.WillaCather.org Father Latour: Becoming a Citizen of the Sky I began this essay with Diogenes the Cynic who famously announced in a fit of rebellion that he was a citizen, not of Athens, or of anyplace else, but only of the cosmos. In what I hope is a creative juxtaposition, in Cathers short story Old Mrs. Harris there is a striking expression of this version of being cosmopolitan, as expressed in the description of the Mr. Rosens sensibility in contrast to that of his wife: All countries were beautiful to Mr. Rosen. He carried a country of his own in his mind, and was able to unfold it like a tent in any wilderness (Obscure Destinies 102). In the last third of Death Comes for the Archbishop, Father Latour experiences an epiphany when he journeys across New Mexico back to Santa Fe, this time in the company of Eusabio, his nomadic Navajo friend. Latour discovers that the world in which he actually dwells is not, after all, the particular place to which a person typically owes allegiance, whether it be a particular village, city or nation. Rather, the world in which he actually now dwells is the sky, the sky!, signifying a place and a space full of motion and change (245). Perhaps this is Father Latours version of Mr. Rosens country of his own that he can from now on unfold . . . like a tent in any wilderness. This is a transformation and a sense of belonging that Father Latour could have had only on that piece of the earth he now inhabitsnot amidst the landscape of his beloved home in France but here in the American Southwest. 21 This aspect of the transformation in his sensibility is distinctively an aesthetic one. As an individual inclined to don an aesthetic perspective from the very beginning (see Murphy), and with a penchant for distancing himself from the particular, Father Latour returns quite deliberately to die in Santa Fe in Book Nine: He did not know just when [the air] had become so necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it (288). But this is not the only respect in which Archbishop Latour becomes a citizen of the cosmos. There is a moral dimension as well. At the end of Book Eight, Latour says to Father Vaillant: You are a better man than I. You have been a great harvestor of souls, without pride and without shame (275). I would like to propose that Latour had discerned in Vaillant a central aspect of his greatness: he was a great Christian missionary. In saying so, Latour recognized a contrast with himself. I detect this key contrast in the words that he utters to his young protg Bernard: My son, I have lived to see two great wrongs righted; I have seen the end of black slavery, and I have seen the Navajos restored to their own country (306). Neither of these two issuesone having to do with social justice, the other with equalityare particularly religious, or Christian; they are, however, deeply moral. In the end, we see that the saving of souls in the Christian sense is not what ultimately matters to Latour. The sentiment is also cosmopolitan to its core: his view about the two great wrongs springs not from narrow parochial loyalty but from something larger. Father Latour began his lifes journey as a man of great character, discipline, intelligence and an instinctive regard for beauty; if he had stayed in France he would no doubt have died a great parish priest with all of his original attributes in evidence. But something radical happened in his travels to and from the New World; his natural attributes, combined with firsthand encounters with the unfamiliar in all of its diversity peoples, places, spaces, topographies, histories, mythologies and adversitiestransformed him into not simply a great missionary, but, in a complex, imperfect, and yet significant way, into a citizen of the cosmos. In this novel Cather brings together two of the places most important to herEurope and the American Southwestbut in an intriguing reversal of her own biography. For while Cather herself went to Europe as an acolyte, with a fresh untutored gaze and returned to the new world a cosmopolitan, I argue that Cathers missionary hero, her Archbishop, originally from the old world of Europe, becomes cosmopolitan in the deepest sense only in Cathers new world. In the end, for Cather, the cross-cultural encounter in Death Comes for the Archbishop becomes the key site of meaning, the space within which one figures out the true nature of belonging, of ones place in the 22 world and ones relationship to all those others with whom one shares that world. NOTE 1. Languages are jealous sovereigns, and passports are rarely allowed for travellers to cross their strictly guarded borders. Rabindranath Tagore, as quoted in Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson. WORKS CITED Alcoff, Linda. The Problem of Speaking for Others. Cultural Critique 20 (1992): 532. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Kindness Among Strangers. New York: Norton, 2006. Brown, Eric. Hellenistic Cosmopolitanism. A Companion to Ancient Philosophy. Ed. Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin. Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2009. Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. 1927. The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. John J. Murphy, Charles W. Mignon, Frederick M. Link, and Kari A. Ronning. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. . Old Mrs. Harris. Obscure Destinies. 1932. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. Kari A. Ronning, Frederick M. Link, and Mark Kamrath. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998. 63178. Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson. Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man. New York: Tauris Parke, 2009. Goodman, Audrey. Translating Southwestern Landscapes: The Making of an Anglo Literary Region. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2002. Murphy, John J. Historical Essay. Death Comes for the Archbishop. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. John J. Murphy, Charles W. Mignon, Frederick M. Link, and Kari A. Ronning. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. 32571. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. 1888. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. Nussbaum, Martha. Cultivating Humanity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Rorty, Richard. Justice as a Larger Loyalty. In Justice and Democracy: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Ron Bontekoe. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1995. Stout, Janis P. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, New York: Macmillan, 1953. Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 Latin Perspectives and Special Friendships in the Aeneid and The Professors House Cristina Giorcelli | University of Rome Three Willa Cathers The Professors House (1925) is rich in intertextual like much of Cathers text, which also depicts struggle. He is mentioned twice in the first book of the novel (111 and 186). references and allusions, which tempt us to discover this puzzling More relevant, however, is Caesars almost exact contemporary novels hidden, overarching meaning. Many of these references Lucretius (9655 BCE), the author of the epic-philosophical are to European medieval and modern artists and artworks: from poem On the Nature of Things, which Italian and French operas (Cimarosas Il presents the Epicurean theory relative matrimonio segreto and Thomass Mignon) to nature and the role of man in an to Brahmss Requiem, Dutch painters (Van atomistic and materialistic universe not Dyck), French embroideries (the Bayeux guided by divine intervention but only ones), Shakespeares Macbeth and Antony by chance. This poem, treating of physics, and Cleopatra, French and Englishpsychology, and ethics, is linguistically language novelists (Anatole France, very difficult, clearly contrasting with Paul Bourget, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Caesars simplicity. It emphasizes personal Swift). Intertextual references to classical responsibility and incites human beings authors are also present: from Euripides to acknowledge that they are victims of and his Medea to Caesar, Lucretius, and passions that they cannot understand. Virgil. I will concentrate on these Latin Lucretiuss conclusion is that since writers, especially Virgil, and suggest their everything, except the atom, is transitory, importance in this novel. one should enjoy the beauty and pleasures Latin Perspectives the world has to offer. Quite surprisingly, Cather started learning Latin at the age Godfrey St. Peter and Tom Outland of nine, probably with her grandmothers, read it, whenduring the summer the and, later, with a private tutor. She took Professors wife, Lillian, and their two two years of Latin at the University of daughters, Rosamond and Kathleen, This marble head of Julius Caesar, discovered on the Nebraska and evidently liked it so much spend in Coloradothey dine together Italian island of Pantelleria, dates to the first century CE. Photo by Euthman/Creative Commons. that she would read Virgil with her brother at Godfreys on rainy or chilly nights Roscoe during summers home from (174).1 And since Tom tells his story college. As has often been noted, Cather saw in the classical world during one of these rainy nights, we realize that their reading and the values that the contemporary way of life and industrialization his telling are associated. The choice of Lucretius after a meal of were destroying: loyalty, endurance, courage, integrity. The three saignant roast lamb rubbed with garlic, steaming asparagus, and a Latin authors she mentions in The Professors House share the epic bottle of sparkling Asti, is somewhat ludicrous because his knotty form: that is, the victory, after many struggles and high personal vocabulary and complex syntax would prove very heavy reading! and social costs, of their protagonists and of humanity itself when Yet, as Tom is a physicist and the mens friendship is passionate it follows the noble paths in life. Thus, all three writers works are and hard to fathom even by them, making Lillian fiercely jealous characterized by a sense of existence dependent on unremitting (50), references to Lucretiuss philosophy are quite appropriate. and inevitable contrasts and battles. While Lucretius is mentioned only once at the end of Book Julius Caesar (10044 BCE) is famous as a writer for his commentaries on the wars he conducted: the Gallic War and the Civil War. Both wars were successful, even if challenging for him and his armies. Caesars language is plain and rudimentary, www.WillaCather.org I (173), Book III begins with a Lucretian consideration: All the most important things in his life, St. Peter sometimes reflected, had been determined by chance, and immediately afterwards he admits that his encounter with Tom Outland had been a stroke 23 of chance he couldnt possibly have imagined (257). Also, at the beginning of the novel, the Professor is said to be terribly selfish about personal pleasures, fought for them. If a thing gave him delight, he got it (27), and at the novels end he realizes He had never learned to live without delight (282). Thus we can see how On the Nature of Things deeply permeates The Professors House, chance and delight being two staples of Epicureanism. deteriorate the relationship between his daughters and they become a source of bitter concern for their father, he begins to sympathize with Euripides, who, having observed women so closely all his life, went and lived in a cave (154). Likewise, the Professor chooses to live in a dismal studio, seen by him as a shadowy crypt (110) in the abandoned family house. As a teacher of history at the university in Hamilton, St. Peter feels ill at ease in an academic system he sees as plagued by nepotism, commercialism, consumerism, and political manipulations. Whereas his relationship with his colleague in history, Professor Langtry, is tinged with hostility due to feuds and politics, his sympathetic alliance with his physicist colleague, Dr. Crane, has been damaged by his daughter Rosamonds greed. Even the Professors published research in eight volumesto which he has dedicated his lifehints at this widespread pugnacious atmosphere as a grandiose epic dealing with conquering and exploiting: Spanish Adventurers in North America. Like his first namesake, Napoleon, the Professor, after many battles, will die in exile, at least estranged from his world. Finally, and perhaps most saliently, he is plagued by an interior existential crisis related to the (presumed) demise of the novels coprotagonist, Tom Outland. Undoubtedly, more pregnant than either of these writers is the presence in the novel of Virgil (7019 BCE), who in his youth was profoundly influenced by Lucretius. Much has been written on Virgils impact on My ntonia (1918), which begins with an epigraph from the Georgics, and, according to Mary R. Ryder, is informed by the epic tone and epic adventure (112) of the Aeneid. If Paul A. Olson calls My ntonia an epic displaced (284) since it proposes the triumph of maternal and creative forces rather than those of war, Erik Thurin argues that a sound interpretation of the novel requires a correct reading of the many allusions to Virgil (204). The Aeneid is not only an allusive presence in The Professors House (it is mentioned by title three times111, 250, 252), but it structures the novel, which, incidentally, like the Aeneid, is subdivided into books (three in Cathers novel, twelve in Virgils Tom too, had led an embattled life. poems). Commissioned by Caesar After an adolescence and youth as an Lucretius. From the frontispiece to T. Lucretius Carus, Augustus in order to celebrate his family orphan, he fought unsuccessfully against Of the Nature of Things, 1682, by Thomas Creech. as descendant from Aeneas, the Aeneid American bureaucracy, ignorance, greed, Drawn and engraved by Michael Burghers. presents the heroic deeds of its eponymous and hypocrisy. Having made a notable hero to establish Trojan culture in Italy after fleeing his pillaged scientific discovery, he then enlisted in the Foreign Legion to city. Not without many difficulties and setbacks, he succeeds at fight in the Great War, leaving others to reap the rewards of his the end in importing traditional values into the new country. invention. Before entering the university, Tom suffered the loss of Incidentally, in The Professors House there is a reference to Virgils his bosom-friend, Rodney Blakea loss for which he was sure he patron in the name of the familys sewing woman, Augusta (the would one day be made accountable. After an argument based on title meaning venerable and protected by the gods). Augusta is a misunderstanding over Anasazi artifactsa misunderstanding a very devout Catholic and at the end of the novel her many sound Tom had caused by his silenceRodney left him in the middle qualitiesamong them, loyalty and integrity (281)make her of the night and Tom, although prompted, failed to reach out symbolic of the legion of people whose companionship and to detain him. Tom admits his guilt: I went to sleep that night assistance the Professor requires during what remains of his life. hoping I would never waken (247). It is reported that he later lost his life in the war. Hardship thus characterizes both the works The Professors House presents the struggles of its protagonist of the three Roman writers as well as the lives of Cathers two against both his domestic and his social environment. Professor protagonists. But there is so much more than these coincidences St. Peter is so troubled by his family (especially, his wife and older daughter) that he is overwhelmed by what he once regarded as the relative to Virgil as to leave no doubt that references to the Aeneid engaging drama of domestic life (26). As envy and ruthlessness are the most poignant in the novel. It is as if Cather wished, on the 24 Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 one hand, to prove how immortal some themes in the Latin poets most celebrated work are and, on the other, to place herself in the wake of such a memorable tradition. Virgil and the Aeneid are rendered more meaningful in The Professors House through reference to a protagonist in Le Mannequin dosier2 (1897), a novel by Anatole France, evoked by the Professor (20) and by his son-in-law, Louie Marsellus (156). For our purposes, this intertextual reference is meaningful because the protagonist of Le Mannequin dosier, Lucien Bergeret, is also an academic: he teaches Latin at the University of Paris. Specifically, he does research on the metrics of the Aeneid, particularly on Book VII, that deals with the encounter of Aeneas with Pallasa momentous event, as we shall see.3 To underline the significance of the Latin poet for him, Professor Bergeret is also said to be preparing a book on Virgilius nauticus (Marine Virgil). Thus, in The Professors House, Virgil and the Aeneid are present both directly and obliquely, as a sort of echo, as a mise-en-abyme. In a note in the Scholarly Edition of Cathers novel, James Woodress and Kari A. Ronning suggest that Toms description of the city on the Blue Mesa is similar to that of the village in which Aeneas finds himself in Book VI, when he goes to Tartarus (380). At the end of Book II in The Professors House Tom declares: When I look into the Aeneid now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page and another behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green pions with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in the midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage . . . (252). Following Woodress and Ronnings hint, John J. Murphy rightly claims in a recent essay that Virgils and Cathers protagonists share analogous feelings of guilt (29395). Special Friendships What may have made the Aeneid so special for Cather is the importance the poem assigns to friendship, the only strong affection that permeates it, besides the genealogical one binding Aeneas to Anchises on one side, and to Ascanius (Iulus)4 on the other. There is, of course, the interlude of Book IV where, after Aeneas arrives in Carthage, its queen, Dido, falls in love with him. Aeneas seems to respond to her love, but soon afterward, reminded by Mercury of his social and historical responsibility and mission, he stealthily leaves with his fleet and people for Italy, and Dido, in despair, commits suicide. Thus, in a poem of struggles against both atmospheric elements and foreign enemies, this singular episode of heterosexual love is soon quenched.5 Thereafter, the one non-genealogical affection left is that of all male friendship. Among a host of male friendships, two stand out: the one between Aeneas and Pallas (in Books VIII, X, and XII) and the www.WillaCather.org one between Nisus and Euryalus (in Book IX). In The Professors House there are two such strong, special friendships: the one between Professor St. Peter and Tom Outland and the one between Tom and Rodney Blake. One may go as far as to affirm that Cathers novel is structured around these two friendships. When not directly described, they are either hinted at or recalled and, thus, always present. Whereas in Virgil, each set of friendships is a discreet and different one, in Cathers novel the two friendships are interconnected through Tom, as he is a partner in both. Not by chance, then, from a narratological perspective, Toms Book is the hinge between the first and the third in the novel. That the Professors friendship with Tom is a special one is shown by the circumstances in which it occurs. As St. Peter confesses, his encounter with Tom happened when husbands [like himself ] had ceased to be lovers (158)6 and when he idealistically entertained a dream of self-sacrificing friendship and disinterested love (169). After admitting that the reason why he keeps teaching at the University is because he loved youth he was weak to it, it kindled him (29), the Professor (in his early fifties) later acknowledges that He had had two romances: one of the heart, which had filled his life for many years, and a second of the mindof the imagination. . . . Outland . . . brought him a kind of second youth (258). The Professor, therefore, indirectly avows that, after having been in love when he married and for several years afterwards, he met a second infatuation (50). Tom, who is in his early twenties and, in St. Peters view, fine-looking, has beautiful handslike Lilliansand a manly, mature voice, full of slight, very moving modulations (111, 119, 124), is homologous with both youth and romance. After Toms death, the Professor says to his materialistic daughter, Rosamond, that my friendship with Outland is the one thing I will not have translated into the vulgar tongue (63). In this statement, the use of the surname seems an exceedingly defensive denial, implying a distance that the rest of the narrative contradicts. In effect, after meeting Tom, the Professor is immediately interested in him, takes him to his study, and makes a companion of him. He becomes Toms mentor and, as such, a sort of father, so much so that he tells his more sympathetic daughter, Kathleen, that for both daughters Tom had been an older brother (130). And, of course, had Tom married Rosamond, to whom he was engaged, he would have been the Professors son-in-law. When St. Peters wife, Lillian, responds jealously to her husbands relationship with Tom, and Tom, sensing this, visits their house less frequently, he and St. Peter met in the alcove behind the Professors lecture room at the university (170). Under these circumstances, in its technical precision the term alcove assumes somewhat ambiguous connotations. 25 The special friendship connecting the Professor and Tom echoes one just as complex in the Aeneid. If Aeneas and Pallas have a sort of father/son tie, they share more surreptitiously a sort of lovers bond. Aeneas acts as vicarious father to Pallas, who had been entrusted to him in Book VII by Pallass elderly father, Evander, who tells Aeneas that under you his master he shall be accustomed to endure warfare and the severe labour of Mars, to behold your deeds and to admire you from his first years (238). Also Pallas, young and handsome, is the only other character besides Dido (when she was seated next to Aeneas at the banquet, at the end of Book I), who asks Aeneas to tell him his story (while voyaging on his left in Book X). By repeating Didos request, Pallas replaces her approaching Aeneas both physically and psychologically. The similarity between Dido and Pallas is confirmed by the way Pallas, immediately after encountering and listening to Aeneas, took him by the hand, and embracing his right hand clung to him (224),7 as if struck by a coup de foudre (the same was true of Dido after listening to Aeneas). And in Book X and XII, Aeneasthe pius hero, famous for his compassioncommits the only ferocious act in the whole epic due to despair over the killing of Pallas. When, in Book X, he hears of Pallass death by Turnuss hand, he kills Magus, who had pleaded for mercy, and a priest of Phoebus and Diana, and, most tellingly, the young and generous Lausus, who had come to his wounded fathers defense and whom, after killing him, Aeneas himself mourns in deep guilt since theirs had been an unjust duel (Aeneas being much stronger and more experienced than the young man). Finally, in Book XII, when Turnus, mortally wounded, begs Aeneas for mercy in the name of his own father, and Aeneas, remembering Anchises, is on the verge of sparing his life, he sees on Turnuss shoulder the precious belt from Pallass corpse, and inflamed with rage and dreadful in wrath (384), he kills the Latin warrior. Comparing the Professor and Tom to Aeneas and Pallas on the basis of age and status, Tom would stand for Pallas and, in fact like him, should die. Juxtaposed to the Aeneid, however, the protagonists positions in Cathers novel shift. At their very first encounter, when St. Peter asks Tom to repeat by heart some of the Latin he claims he knows, Tom recites Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem (112): the beginning of Book II of the Aeneid where Aeneas recounts the story of the fall of Troy. Dido is so moved by his words that his countenance and his telling dwell fixed in her heart, nor does care allow peaceful rest to her limbs (95). In the novel, on this occasion Tom would thus stand for Aeneas and the Professor for Dido.8 As, in his declamation, Tom steadily continued for fifty lines or more (112),9 St. Peter is so impressed that he takes him under his wing, to the point that 26 he wouldnt hear of his going away (115)just as Dido did after Aeneass telling. Finally, during this same first encounter, Tom presents Lillian and the two daughters with princely gifts (120), like those Aeneas gives Dido in Book I. To make the similarity between Dido and the Professor more meaningful, St. Peter contemplates suicide toward the end of the novel by neglecting his malfunctioning gas stove. However, it is Tomwhose surname, Outland, indicates that he is not of this land, not of this earthas Aeneas (and not the Professor as Dido) who is said to die, thus switching the destinies of the Aeneids two protagonists. But, if St. Peter lives, it is only to prepare himself for death: in his dejection, he feels outward bound (281). It must also be emphasized that Tom is connected to Aeneas because of his feelings for the city on the mesa, which he tells St. Peter he regards as a religious emotion,10 adding, I had read of filial piety in the Latin poets (250). The love bond between the Professor and Tom is, therefore, intertwined with filial piety, as in the case of Aeneas and Pallas. The other special friendship in the Aeneid involves Nisus and Euryalus, two young men whose tie of love is so strong (There was to them one love, says Virgil [253]) that they die together. Nisus is swift with the dart and light arrows (253) and Euryalus, the younger, is extraordinarily handsome: there was not another of the Trojans . . . more beautiful . . . a boy marking his unshaved face with the first youthful bloom (253). In the vain attempt to rescue Euryalus, ambushed by the Latins in a forest, Nisus, who had succeeded in escaping, goes back and dies with him. In Cathers novel, Rodney, a cowboy about ten years older than Tom and described by him as the sort of fellow who can do anything for somebody else, and nothing for himself . . . (183), takes care of Tom, cures him when he falls ill, makes sure he studies his Latin, and sells the Indian pottery to a German collector because he thinks that the money will enable Tom to attend college. As Tom admits, He liked to be an older brother (184). On the Blue Mesa, when the two friends are joined by an old Englishman who cooks, Tom asserts that the three of us made a happy family (196). As Tom avows, He [Rodney] surely got to think a lot of me and I did of him (184). Analogous to the bond between the Professor and Tom, Rodneynoble, noble Roddy as Kathleen defines him (122)is to Tom both vicarious father/brother and loving friend. In a disconcerting, but pertinent observation, Tom declares, Nature is full of such substitutions, but they always seem to me sad (184). If Professor St. Peter echoes Anatole Frances Professor Bergeret, an echo, a mise-en-abyme, of the stronger-than-death tie binding Nisus to Euryalus is to be found in another French text, the medieval epic poem Amis et Amiles,11 mentioned by Kathleen (129) when she sees on her fathers couch the purple blanket, Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 Cantarella, Dynes, and Donaldson). Virgils and Cathers sets of friendships show the primacy of loveas unselfishness, as limitless generosityover all (Omnia vincit amor, Virgil had sung in Eclogue X), as opposed to the heterosexual love turned sour that in the novel characterizes the relationship now existing between St. Peter and his wife. Furthermore, for Aeneas and Pallas as well as for the two sets of friendships in The Professors House, these homosocial relationships are also ingrained in a familial, if vicarious, tie: be it that of father or son or brother, thus suggesting the foundational importance of kinship, rooted either in blood orwhen there are no blood sons or brothers as in these cases in emotional consonance. A portrait bust of Virgil, located at the burial vault in Naples said to be his tomb. Photo by A. Hunter Wright/Creative Commons. faded in streaks of amethyst, with a pale yellow stripe at either end that Rodney had given Tom and that was like his [Toms] skin (128).12 Significantlyand, perhaps, more physically (erotically?) than in any other instancethis blanket now envelops St. Peter when he gets chilly in his studio at night. Whereas in the Aeneid the two friends die, in the French medieval epic they survive,13 and in The Professors House both disappear: Rodney cannot be found anywhere in spite of many searches, and Tom is said to have died, Cathers narrative beginning after his demise. (Let us not forget that the Foreign Legion in which Tom enlisted with the hope of finding Rodney [129] is a perfect institution to die away from the world, as one is protected by absolute anonymity). Like Rodney and Tom, Professor St. Peter too will, perhaps, soon disappearas he foresees he willbut, metatextually, beyond the novels boundaries. In conclusion, analogous to Virgils prudence in dealing with all-male friendships in the Aeneid (even if same-sex relationships were not a source of scandal in the Roman world and Virgil had been more explicit about them in Eclogue II), Cather presents male friendships in this novel as homosocial relations that give meaning to or, better, that structure the life of an individual (see www.WillaCather.org What I have just affirmed might seem contradicted by Toms behavior toward Roddy the night of the latters departure. But here another element may have intervened. Cather never comments onand, thus, seems to agree withToms accusation of Rodney as the one who considered the Indian pots personal and not national properties (even if, as Tom himself later concedes, I had never told him just how I felt about those things [238], and, consequently, Rodney had rightfully called Toms reproach this Fourth of July talk [244]). I think that Cather shared with Virgil the classical ideal of sacrifice for the greater good, of individual transcendence through personal abnegation. In the classical world one can consider the web of immediate personal connections as less important than . . . the abstract universal cause of humanity (Benjamin 7879). As a novel written just after the Great War, selling Anasazi pots to a German for monetary gain would have seemed the ultimate effrontery. Beyond the thematic hints that Cather may have drawn from the Aeneid, there may have been another more substantial reason for her choosing Virgils epic as a reference text. As a genre, the traditional epic form was based on a unique perspective, on the controlling, objective, superior, monistic vision afforded by the speaking voice, which was the unifying ideological pivot of the narrative and guaranteed a trans-individual truth, thus preventing the characters individual plights from fracturing the text with subjective views and the epic form from becoming a tragedy (see Conte). Compared to the traditional epic, the Virgilian epic is largely innovative because the speaking voice is more sympathetic (the narrator often intervenes in the narrative) and empathic regarding his characters doubts and complexities; for instance, if Aeneas submits to destiny, he does so with pain. Because for Virgil history is something entirely separate from myth, he presents the tensions derived from the contradictions that are present in history. In Cathers 1925 novel, the presentation of the different points of view does not coalesce under a superior logic: all relationshipsincluding friendshipswaver, are broken into facets, are all plausible, 27 acceptable, and, finally, composite. This, as well as its complex network (game?) of allusions, establishes this text as modernist. NOTES 1. Another instance of Lucretian influence in the novel: The Professor had let chance take its way, as it had done with him so often (282). 2. Much has been written on this French novel that certainly inspired Cather in the creation of the two female forms (one, a headless and armless bust, and the other, a full-length figure without legs), prominently displayed in the Professors studio. To these formson which Augusta used to hang the unfinished dresses of his wife and two daughters when they were smallhe is deeply attached. In Anatole Frances novel, when Professor Bergeret discovers that his wife betrays him with his best pupil, he throws out of the window the wicker dummy on which she models her dresses. 3. In this book also the magnificent shield, helmet, sword and spear commissioned by Venus to Vulcan for her son, Aeneas, are described. 4. Aeneass son is called both Ascanius (his original name) and Julus (the name he takes up in Latium). 5. The tie between Aeneas and his Latin spouse, Lavinia, is only hinted at as it regards the foreseen, but unsung future. 6. The Professor calls the two female forms my ladies and my women (22) and does not want to be separated from them. 7. In Chapter XIII, after his encounter with Dr. Crane, when the Professor makes the partially incongruous analogy between his world and a boat and stars (149), Cather may have had in mind this passage from the Aeneid, since Pallas, when he sails on Aeneass boat, besides pleading Aeneas to tell him his story, asks him to be instructed about the stars. 8. This scene may be seen as a kind of Elizabethan performance (Shakespearean works are mentioned twice in this novel), when, not allowed on the stage, womens roles were played by young men. 9. That is, he reaches the point where Aeneas relates that the Greeks, pretending departure, leave a huge wooden horse in front of Troys walls. 10. Incidentally, the strong father/son tie (Aeneas/ Ascanius/Julus) is so momentous because it signifies genealogy, the guarantee of a future for the blood line. 11. The names are of Latin origin: they come from Amicus and Amelius. The French epic tells of Amis, who is stricken with 28 leprosy because he committed perjury in order to save Amiles. A vision informed Amis that he could only be cured by bathing in the blood of Amiless children. When Amiles learns this, he promptly kills his children, who are, however, miraculously restored to life after Amis is cured. 12. Incidentally, these three colors are also chthonian ones, announcing death. See Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. John Buchanan-Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 20, 11371139, 792795. 13. To make the connection of this novel with Virgil and medieval French literature subtler and more intricate, the Professor, talking to his wife (49), mentions Phyllis (the shepherdess in Virgils Eclogues) and Nicolette, the female protagonist of the French twelfth century genre-composite work Aucassin et Nicoletteanother story of contrasted love. WORKS CITED Benjamin, Jessica. A Desire of Ones Own: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Inter-Subjective Space. Feminist Studies, Critical Studies. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. Cantarella, Eva. Bisexuality in the Ancient World. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002. Cather, Willa. The Professors House. 1925. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. James Woodress, Kari A. Ronning, and Frederick M. Link. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002. Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant. A Dictionary of Symbols. Trans. John Buchanan-Brown. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Conte, Gian Biagio. Virgilio: lepica del sentimento. Torino: Einaudi, 2002. Dynes, Wayne R. and Donaldson, Stephen, eds. Homosexuality in the Ancient World. London: Routledge, 1992. Murphy, John J. A Poem, A Painting, and Willa Cathers Museum Epiphanies, Modes and Facets of the American Scene. Studies in Honor of Cristina Giorcelli, ed. Dominique Marais. Rome: Ila Palma, 2014. 27588. Olson, Paul A. The Epic and Great Plains Literature: Rlvaag, Cather, and Neihardt, Prairie Schooner 55 (Spring-Summer 1981): 26385. Ryder, Mary R. Our ntonia: The Classical Roots of Willa Cathers American Myth, Classical and Modern Literature, 12 (1990): 111117. Thurin, Erik I. The Humanization of Willa Cather: Classicism in an American Classic. Lund: Lund UP, 1980. Virgil. The Aeneid. Interlinear translation by Levi Hart and V. R. Osborne. Philadelphia: McKay, 1882. Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 An Elegy for the Reader: Europe and the Narrative of Self-formation in Lucy Gayheart Richard H. Millington | Smith College Where Is Cathers Europe? In early March of 1908 Willa Cather wrote her brother Roscoe a letter anticipating her first trip to Rome: I got my guide book for Rome the other day. Seems queer to be really on the way to Rome; for of course Rome has always existed for one, it was a central fact in ones life in Red Cloud and was always the Capital of ones imagination. Rome, London, and Paris were serious matters when I went to the South ward schoolthey were the three principal cities in Nebraska, so to speak. (Selected Letters 105) Cathers arresting phrasingRome, London, and Paris . . . were the three principal cities in Nebraskapoints the way toward the answer Ill be proposing to the question raised in this essays opening movement: Where is Cathers Europe? Compressed within the letters striking sentences is a sense of place not geographical but cultural and imaginative: Rome, London, and Paris are not simply cities that one might visit; they, and the Europe they represent, exist in a place at once pedagogical (they were serious matters when I went to the South ward school) and self-constituting (Rome is the Capital of ones imagination, a central fact in ones life). This glimpse of the self-formative function of an imagined Europe is vividly captured and confirmed in a still-earlier letterCather is fifteennotable for its intense ambition and bad spelling: I see a goo[d] deal of [music teacher] Mrs. [Peorianna Bogardus] Sill for she is at least a imatation of the things I most lack. She is as self satisfied as ever and her narrations are pretty much the same as they were some four years ago when I met her first. I am, to say the least, familiar with themsay, some things look better at a distance, dont they?A continental tour is a test of character, some men it makes some it mars. I am very egar to press with my profane pedals the native soil of heroes and poets, but when I return I dont want my whole life to be a European souvenir. (Selected Letters 9; bracketed letters and phrases supplied by the editors) Cathers Europe, we begin to see, is a crucial stop on a recognizable itinerary of self-making. Though embraced with distinctive eagerness by the young Cather, the scenario sketched www.WillaCather.org The illustrations in this essay are by Pruett Carter, created for the original serialization of Lucy Gayheart in Womans Home Companion, MarchJuly, 1935. out in these letters is a familiar one to students of nineteenthcentury middle-class aspiration. A lifes unfolding is imagined as the progressive acquisition of depth, accompanied by an attendant investment in the practices and emotions felt to assist this acquisition, chief among them, reading, understood as an act of self-formation, with European travel (to the sites of that reading) construed as a kind of pilgrimage. This scenario is not simply an element in the biography of a singular young woman but an ideological trajectory, a foundational narrative that nineteenth-century American middleclass culture, hungry for elevation, proposed to its ambitious offspring. And that culture seems to have proposed this narrative of self-making with special force to young people like Willa Cather and, earlier in the century, to William Dean Howells, another 29 letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher from the summer of 1902, in which Cather expresses her delight that the local landscape and its denizens conform exactly to the version she had encountered in the poemsIs football playing/along the river shore? Well I guess yes (Selected Letters 63). Like other American pilgrims to Europe, Cather is encounteringseeking to confirm would be a better phrasea place already experienced on the wings of print, and her all-but-inconsolable disappointment when she meets the actual A. E. Housman derives from measuring him against his imagined, reading-derived predecessor. In Cathers world, before there was Europe, there was reading, and Cathers Europe, like the young self that longs to visit it, is made out of books. Lucy Gayheart and the Fate of Reading small-town Midwesterner impelled eastward by literary desire so intense that it made becoming a person of culture seem like the most alluring form of romance.1 If one corollary to the claim I am making herethat Europes fundamental location for Cather lies within the geography of American self-formationis that its status is not simply personal but ideological, here is another, one still more crucial to the argument about the meaning of Lucy Gayheart I am about to unfold. One reaches this Europe not by boat but by book; the meaning of Europe for a young person situated as Cather was is not an effect of travel but an effect of reading. We get a confirmation of the formative power of readings Europe in Edith Lewiss biography, with its tribute to the role played in Cathers development by her teachers: Eva Case, the Goudys, the amazing store-clerk/classicist William Ducker, readings emissaries all in Cathers Red Cloud world. Their tutelage instilled in her, as Lewis sees it, an enabling discontent: What she was chiefly conscious of was a whole continent of ignorance surrounding her in every direction, like the flat land itself; separating her from everything she admired, everything she longed for and wanted to become (Lewis 28). And we see this intense, self-forming drama of responsivenessa drama that unfolds from the encounter with the books that speak Europes resonant namein some striking scenes from the fiction as well: Jim Burden and Tom Outland enchambered with their Virgil; Vickie Templetons absorptive, self-creating sojourns in the Rosens library in Old Mrs. Harris. (These scenes, it seems to me, have a deeper, more revealing affinity to Lucy Gayheart than does The Song of the Lark, its ostensibly inevitable counterpart.) And, finally, we can find confirmation of the priority of textuality over geography when we turn to Cathers first actual experience of European travel: Im thinking here of the description of her visit to A. E. Housmans Shropshire in a 30 But what does this claim, that the Europe of Cathers life and fiction is preeminently an emanation of the book, have to do with Lucy Gayheart? Here, in brief, is my answer: Lucy Gayheart in its characterizations, in its action, in its allusive texture, in its formis a book made out of reading, and its central character exemplifies the transformation-eager receptiveness evoked in the young Cather of these letters and of Lewiss portrait, and in the fictional characters I have mentioned. Though Clement Sebastian is American in origin, he is, as a singer in the classical tradition, one of Europes transformative emissaries; Lucy is an accompanist, much more a student than an artist, and her relation to Sebastian is, most deeply, construed as the relation between a loving reader and a text.2 In this section of the essay, I make the case for this reading-focused interpretation of the novel. For an ostensibly minor novel, Lucy Gayheart has provoked a distinguished set of interpretations within our critical tradition. Yet even many readings richly sympathetic to the book and its heroine tend to find their way, by one route or another, to a rhetoric of diminishment: If only Lucy had found a way to become a real artist, they often seem to say or sigh, then we might have something.3 This view of the novel seems to me to be profoundly mistaken. For one thing, there is no evidence that Lucy has conceived, as she contemplates her return to Chicago, a desire to be anything other than the art-and-experience hungry accompanist she has been. The critics wish to make Lucy an artist or see her as an artist manqu has more to do with a perceptual habitthe all-but-automatic espousal of a hieratic view of the artistthan with the behavior of Cathers textthough that hieratic view of the artist is certainly one that Cather frequently espoused. (This is really the only bad thing that I will have to say about her in this essay.) My own argument will cut against the grain of this critical habit of mind. Here is its fundamental claim: Lucy Gayheart is not a book about creativity; it is a book about responsivenessabout, this to say, the capacity of the kind of selfWilla Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 transforming reading of art, or experience, evoked by the letters I have just discussed. Everything that matters in Lucy Gayheart whats beautiful, whats beloved, what frightens, what torments, whats evil, whats goodunfolds along an axis of responsiveness, and is measured on that scale. The novels commitment to narrative of responsiveness can best be demonstrated by tracking Lucys trajectory through the novel, in which her response to art and the emergence of love unfold as versions of each other. What follows is a sequence of passages, of key moments in that trajectory, which I will read in a reading-centered way. While the novel opens with a communally based narrative voice establishing how Lucy resonates in the town memorywith how she has been responded toits action proper begins with Lucy taking things in. Here is Lucy, riding home from skating, witnessing the appearance of the evenings first star: Suddenly Lucy started and struggled under the tight blankets. In the darkening sky she had seen the first star come out; it brought her heart into her throat. The point of silver light spoke to her like a signal, released another kind of life and feeling which did not belong here. It overpowered her. With a mere thought she had reached that star and it had answered, recognition had flashed between. Something knew, then, in the unknowing waste: something had always known, forever! . . . The flash of understanding lasted but a moment. . . . It was too bright and too sharp. It hurt, and made one feel small and lost. (1314) force, not a melting mood, of passion that drowns like black water. As she sat listening to this man the outside world seemed to her dark and terrifying, full of fears and dangers that had never come close to her until now. (33) Her response continues to reverberate after she returns home, and in the days that follow, and I need to let you hear more of it: Lucy had come home and up the stairs, into this room, tired and frightened, with a feeling that some protecting barrier was gonea window had been broken that let in the cold and darkness of the night. Sitting here in her cloak shivering, she had whispered over and over the words of that last song. . . . It was as if that song were to have some effect upon her own life. She tried to forget it but it was unescapable. . . . For weeks afterwards it kept singing itself over in her brain. Her forebodings on that first night had not been mistaken; Sebastian had already destroyed a great deal for her. Some peoples lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property; but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughtsthat and nothing more. (3435) Theres much to notice in this passage, but let me emphasize two things: the first is the way this time-honored encounter with beauty is recast as a drama of response; Cather gives us the passage not as a mere act of sensory reception but as an intense exchange. The starlight speaks to Lucy, and as it speaks, it releases within her a feeling that is hers but one she cannot yet recognize as her own. The second observation: this experience is dynamic, first exhilarating then destabilizing. The passage at once establishes Lucy as a figure of responsiveness and responsiveness as profoundly active. Seeing the star is transformative: it makes and then, disturbingly, remakesher anew. We encounter a similar emphasis on responsiveness as a form of action in a later passage, which gives us an account of Lucys experience of hearing Sebastian sing for the first time (he performs a selection of Schubert lieder, followed by When We Two Parted, a setting of Byrons poem): She was struggling with something she had never felt before. A new conception of art? It came closer than that. A new kind of personality? But it was much more. It was a discovery about life, a revelation about love as a tragic www.WillaCather.org 31 We witness in this passage, like its predecessor, what might be called the romantic elevation of reception. There is little disposition, in either passage, to distinguish between thrilling and terrifying responses: intensity is all. Note, too, this passages evocation of the immediacy, the solitude of reading: Lucys response intensifies upon her return to her apartmentsitting here in her cloak, shivering (my emphasis: consider that curious here, which make Lucys room simultaneously the location of our own reading)and it reverberates as the days go by. Our attention has been shifted from the drama of Sebastians performance to the drama of Lucys response, and the effects of that response, as in her encounter with the star, are transformative, self-creating: Sebastian had already destroyed a great deal for her. Here, too, there is a subtlety of phrasing worth remarking: for her seems quite clearly to mean on her behalf not at her expense; her response to Sebastians singing has been the making of her. As it is with art, so it is with love, or with art and love combined, as they are in Lucys relationship with Sebastian. Just as beauty and art are defined as occasions for responsiveness in the passages above, so erotic experience is imagined as an exchange of recognitions, of readings of the beloved one. Here is the moment when Sebastian first takes Lucy in his arms: Lucy felt him take everything that was in her heart; there was nothing to hold back any more. His soft, deep breathing seemed to drink her up entirely, to take away all that was timid, uncertain, bewildered. Something beautiful and serene came from his heart into hers; wisdom and sadness. If he took her secret, he gave her his in return; that he had renounced life. Nobody would ever share his life again. But he had unclouded faith in the old and lovely dreams of man; that he would teach her and share with her. (93) Thats nice, but more interesting still, is the way this moment of mutual recognition is recast, a few pages later, in the solitary key of reading: It was at night, when she was quiet and alone, that she got the greatest happiness out of each dayafter it had passed! Why this was she never knew. In the darkness she went over every moment of the morning again. Nothing was lost, not a phrase of a song, not a look on his face or a motion of his hand. In these quiet hours she had time to reflect, and to realize that the few weeks since the 4th of January were longer than the twenty-one years that had gone before. . . . Since then she had changed so much in her thoughts, in her ways, even in her looks, that she might wonder she knew herselfexcept that the changes were all in the direction of becoming more 32 and more herself. She was no longer afraid to like or to dislike anything too much. It was as if she had found some authority for taking what was hers and rejecting what seemed unimportant. (99100) As Cather gives this scene to us, it is in the reading-like space of private reflectionin the replaying of the day, in these quiet hours in her roomthat her relationship with Sebastian achieves its full power. And that power, we recognize, at once derives from her capacity for intense responseher readerlinessand emphatically emerges as a form of self-making: the changes were all in the direction of becoming more and more herself. My argumentthat Lucys trajectory within the novel unfolds along an axis of responsiveness, that the power of selfmaking that we witness as she moves is rendered as a growing capacity for readings enlivening workwill now, I think be clear. Two closing, confirmatory notes: first, the passage I have just been discussing, as it continues, seems to provide an irresistible confirmation of this claim, for Cather explicitly marks this moment of self-affirming growth as a gain in Lucys skill as a reader: Until she had begun to play for Sebastian she had never known that words had any value aside from their direct meaning (101). And second: the reawakening that comes, late in the book, to a Lucy benumbed by grief, when she hears the itinerant Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 soprano sing The Bohemian Girl is renderedemphatically, unmistakablynot as a desire to become an artist but as a hunger for something to respond to: She wanted flowers and music and enchantment and love,all the things she had first known with Sebastian . . . . Suddenly something flashed into her mind, so clear that it must have come from without, from the breathless quiet. What ifwhat if Life itself were the sweetheart? It was like a lover waiting for her in distant citiesacross the sea; drawing her, enticing her, weaving a spell over her. . . . Oh, now she knew! She must have it, she couldnt run away from it. She must go back into the world and get all she could of everything that had made him what he was. . . . Let it come! Let it all come back to her again! Let it betray her and mock her and break her heart, she must have it! (195) l Having spent so much time listening for the resonances of reading in the language of Cathers portrayal of Lucy, I must move with untoward speed to support my claim that the conception of responsiveness that shapes this characterization governs, more broadly, the novel as a whole. If the good things of Lucy Gayheartself-expansion, sympathy, wisdom, loveare measured on a scale of responsiveness, so are its darker experiences and emotions. What is it that is most to be feared in the novel? It is the loss of the capacity to respond: That happiness she had so lately found, where was it? Everything threatened it, the way of the world was against it. It had escaped her. She had lost it as one can lose a ravishing melody. . . . And she couldnt breathe in this other kind of life. It stifled her, woke her in a frantic fear (109). Accordingly, it is as the realized form of this fearas a lost capacity to respondthat she feels her grief at Sebastians death: To have ones heart frozen and ones world destroyed in a momentthat was what it had meant (164). What drives and torments Lucy after Sebastians death? It is the burden of the lie she told to Harry about her relationship with Sebastianand her hunger for his renewed responsiveness to her is above all a hunger to be seen fully, to be read correctly. What makes James Mockford the villain of the novel? It is precisely his capacity to make Lucys feeling for Sebastian, her response to his art, her reader-like role as his accompanist and pupil feel empty, a mockery, nothing but make-believe (64). What, finally, constitutes cruelty in Lucy Gayheart? Its the willful betrayal of ones capacity to respond, as when Harrys vivid refusals to respond to her seem to lock Lucy into stasis and grief, and send her, enraged, to her final skate: If he should put his hand on her, or look directly into her eyes and flash the old signal, she believed it would waken something and start the machinery going to carry her along (185). www.WillaCather.org If the thwarting of responsiveness defines the way of cruelty and loss in the book, it is the retrospective achievement or recovery of that capacity that comes to define human value as the novel ends. We glimpse this late, retrospective version of responsiveness in the brief portrait of Mrs. Ramsay in Book II, which gives us Lucys return to Haverford after Sebastians death. The widow of one of the towns founders, a woman long active and executive, she has aged, her daughter thinks, beautifully and surprisingly: she was more interested in other people, all people, now than she used to be (152). Listening to her mothers expression of sympathy for Lucy, her daughter is almost startled by something beautiful in her mothers voice. It was not the quick, passionate sympathy that used to be there for a sick child or a friend in trouble. No, it was less personal, more ethereal. More like the Divine compassion. And her mother used to be so stormy, so personal. If growing old did that to ones voice and ones understanding, one need not dread it so much, the daughter was thinking (155). And we see it most fully in the novels compressed, remarkable Book III, in which Harry Gordon remakes his life in the key of memory, along the axis of responsiveness: For years he had tried never to think about Lucy at all. But for a long while now he had loved to remember her. . . . In spite of all the misery he had been through on her account, Lucy was the best thing he had to remember. When he looked back into the past, there was just one face, one figure, that was mysteriously lovely. All the other men and women he had known were more or less like himself (233234). Harry lives a quiet, even a readerly lifeplaying chess with Lucys father, hiding out, alone with his memories, in his back office at the bank. Through memory he recoversfirst in torment, then through acts of kindness and fidelity, the still-responsive self she had seen in him: He was conceited and hard to teach, but she believed that he would go on learning about life (199200). We return, in this late phrasing, to the knot of emotions and ambitions with which we beganto the pedagogical love, the readers love, glimpsed in those early letters. Who Dies in Lucy Gayheart? Let me conclude by trying to bring the opening section of this papermy evocation of Cathers book-made Europe and of the role it played in her ideologically resonant self-makingtogether with the interpretation of Lucy Gayheart I have been proposing. While Lucy herself never travels farther than Chicago, Cather renders Lucys self-becoming as an awakening to the Europe evoked by her encounter with the cosmopolitan Sebastian, by her self-defining responses to and reading of the complex experiences sedimented in his art and his character. From this conjunctionbetween the reading-centered self-formation that Cather evokes in her letters and the reading-focused way she tells Lucys storythe novel emerges, in affinity to its third book, as itself an act of retrospection 33 and remembering. Lucy Gayheart is an elegy for the reader in two senses. For Cather the writer, the book acknowledges and celebrates the readers, the Lucys, that have called into being her fiction through their enlivening responses to it.4 For Cather the person, we might hear in the book her remembrance of, her farewell to, herself as a young reader, hungry for books, for Europe, for the romance of selfmaking her reading and learning would call forth within her. Why is there so much dying in Lucy Gayheart? Because readingthough it shows the way toward a kind of living, as Cather knew more fully and intensely than almost anyoneis also, as books end, as characters leave us, a kind of dyingfor them and for us. Maybe this is one of the many things she learned from Sarah Orne Jewett, something we hear at the end of The Country of the Pointed Firs: When I went in again the little house had suddenly grown lonely, and my room looked empty as it had the day I came. I and all my belongings had died out of it, and I knew now how it would seem when Mrs. Todd came back and found her lodger gone. So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end (Jewett 139). It is, finally, this indispensable capacity to read, and to die, and to read and to die again that Cather asks us to witness, to mourn, and to celebrate in Lucy Gayheart. NOTES 1. For a fuller account of this cultural history, see my Where is Hawthornes Rome?. 2. Intriguingly, both of the young women commonly attested as prototypes for the character of Lucy seem to be emissariesor perhaps exilesfrom readings world of initiation and accomplishment. Sadie Becker, a young woman with a rich contralto laugh, identified by Cather as the girl who used to skate in the old rink, dressed in a red jersey, was an accomplished musician and accompanist who moved to Red Cloud from New York (Selected Letters 570, 678); Anna Gayhardt was a dandy sort of a girl, handsome as a picture and finely educated, reads and speaks German like a top, who finds herself teaching school in Blue Hill, Nebraska; after a late night of dancing, she and Willa sharing quarterswent to bed, and she was so glad to meet somebody from civilization that we talked books and theatre until the daylight came through the shutters (28). 3. For me, the most persuasive readings of the novel are those that see Cather as raising, via her representation of Lucy, expansive and central questions of human meaning making. I am thinking especially of essays or chapters by David Stouck, Blanche Gelfant, Richard Giannone, Elaine Apthorp, and David Porter. Even Cathers most distinguished readers, in perceptive treatments of the novel, seem to me to fall into the this mode of diminishment, as when Joseph Urgo construes Lucy as uninteresting in herself, 34 but valuable as an illustration of the way a lifes meaning stays mobile after the body succumbs to the stasis of death (Urgo 117), or when Janis Stout sees her as admirable for taking, in her poignant life, a step toward becoming a real artist (Stout 264). No need, in my view, to mention the numerous flatly dismissive accounts of the novel and its title character. 4. My essay might be heard as an accompaniment, in another key, to Charles Johanningsmeiers fascinating work on the selection of letters from ordinary readers that Cather kept and carried with her over the years. WORKS CITED Apthorp, Elaine Sargent. Re-Visioning Creativity: Cather, Chopin, Jewett. Legacy 9 (1992): 122. Cather, Willa. Lucy Gayheart. 1935. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. David Porter, Kari Ronning, and Frederick M. Link. U of Nebraska P, 2015. .The Selected Letters of Willa Cather. Ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout. New York: Knopf, 2013. Gelfant, Blanche. The Disembodiment of Lucy Gayheart. Women Writing in America: Voices in Collage. Hanover: UP of New England, 1984. 11743. Giannone, Richard. Music, Silence, and the Spirituality of Willa Cather. Renascence 57 (2005): 12349. Jewett, Sarah Orne. The Country of the Pointed Firs. 1896. Ed. Deborah Carlin. Peterborough: Broadview, 2010. Johanningsmeier, Charles. Cathers Readers, Traditionalism, and Modern America. Cather Studies 10: Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Anne L. Kaufman and Richard H. Millington. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2015. 3867. Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record. 1953. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000. Millington, Richard. Where is Hawthornes Rome?: The Marble Faun and the Cultural Space of Middle-Class Leisure. Roman Holidays: Hawthorne, James, and Others in Italy, Ed. Robert K. Martin and Leland S. Person. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2002, pp. 927. Porter, David. Following the Lieder: Cather, Schubert, and Lucy Gayheart. Cather Studies 10: Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Anne L. Kaufman and Richard H. Millington. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2015. 32848. Stouck, David. Willa Cathers Imagination. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1975. Stout, Janis P. Willa Cather: The Writer and her World. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000. Urgo, Joseph R. Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995. Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 Pierre Loti and Willa Cathers Journey Home: So Near, So Far Franoise Palleau-Papin | Universit Paris 13-Sorbonne Paris Cit My letter to Willa Cather, care of the ether, the Great Beyond, considers the affinities between French writer Pierre Loti (18501923) and Willa Cather, who greatly admired his works. Ill try and imagine what you read in Lotis works, and this will reflect my choice, my mistakes or my discoveries, in the hope that it will bring pleasant memories of reading to you. My understanding is that, far from mimicry, you found a community of purpose with Pierre Loti. But first I need to remind you of a few biographical elements, which Loti, with his sense of publicity, tended to throw into peoples faces when he most cultivated originality. So please bear with me, dear Willa, while I briefly concentrate in his works. Dear Willa, You had to leave Virginia and then Nebraska and gather a hoard of cultural spoils away from home to return to your first impressions, As a high-school teacher you assigned Lotis Iceland Fisherman having kept the memory of the looped trajectory of your life and (1886) to your class.1 You admired his art. You had to travel far away before you could return home in writing from novel, and thought you should pass it on another vantage point. In this, you were to your students, probably because the much like Pierre Loti, who may have well subject, the life of Breton fishermen, and been a role model for you. You knew he Breton women surviving deprivation was a Frenchman who traveled the world and loss, but also for the style in over, who lived in Polynesian islands, in which Loti writes: a beautiful prose, Japan and also in Turkey for months on elegiac and melancholy, but without end. Like you, he was unconventional, flourish. Was there also something in but well-established. He challenged his adventurous, peripatetic life that the gender assumptions of his time. He attracted and challenged you, Willa? At was a man of complex masculinity. A the very moment you assigned Iceland colonialist of ambivalent colonialism, he Fisherman you were already wondering took part in the colonial enterprise, but if you had the courage to drop the steady, contributed to shift it from within, as female-gendered job of teaching highhis novel Aziyad, set in Constantinople, school for something more rewarding, changed the view Europeans had and you did. First, you stopped teaching of the Ottomans. In their diary, the and took up magazine editing. Then you de Goncourt brothers, Edmond and dropped that too, when you realized it Jules, write of him that he is a wonderful was too time-consuming and drained scenery painter, an admirable visionary of your precious energy and sapped the nature (lundi 14 juin 1886 1256). So Pierre Loti dressed as an acrobat, 1876. concentration you needed to write. Did were you. In Sapphira and the Slave Girl you also aspire to his fame? He was, (1940) you knew how to depict a natural scene, to make it speak after all, elected a member of the French Academy in 1891, an of its indifference to the feelings of a character walking through it, honor incessantly coveted by Zola. Loti was poetic in a prosaic or of its allure, or of an older narrators fear of her own nostalgia way; he wrote with a directness and simplicity you admired, and when writing about such glory. You had the young Nancy walk he also had the recognition you aspired to. That recognition did through the Double S (169) in that unforgettable page of such not daunt you in a gendered way, because he was not a masculine dangerous seduction, when the devilish rogues of slavery and sexual paragon of fame. In fact he looked cross-gendered. Thin and consummation lurk around the corner, ready to destroy the paradise refined, he wore makeup, perfume, and jewelry, was elegant in of dogwoods in bloom to satisfy their passion. You knew the magic a dandy-like way, both feminine and masculine. But despite his of suggestion through nature, and you made it all the more powerful effeminate appearance he was married right and left, as the because you saw it retrospectively, having left Virginia to consider it French saying goes.2 He had a left-hand marriage, and fathered from afar and from the distance of time and maturity. children into a ripe old age in both his legitimate and illegitimate www.WillaCather.org 35 families, but managed to keep this a secret. uprooted from Virginia to Nebraska, Loti You will remember, Willa, that in his works, describes Gauds feeling of estrangement Loti does not write about his family life when she leaves Paris and arrives in Brittany, but rather about the strength of friendship which she knew only as a child, and then about love in impossible relationships due only in summer. Gaud finds winter Brittany to cultural differences, or because of the terribly harsh.4 In a similar expression of estrangement, no matter how used to the sea vicissitudes of life. In Iceland Fisherman, the Yann the sailor is, he still finds the Icelandic fisherman is married to the sea, dies in the seas sea he fishes in impossible to comprehend, cold embrace and never returns to his wife in and is awed by what strikes him as aspects of Brittany; in Aziyad (1879), the adulterous counter-life, of a world that has come to an friendship between a French diplomat and end or has not yet been created.5 He finds a Turkish married woman is doomed. Loti the sun unrecognizable, as if going counter to often describes homosocial friendships as creation, reverting to chaos: it rather looked stronger than conventional amorous ones, like some poor, dying yellow planet, which and he describes his men characters lovingly. Louis Marie-Julien Viaud as a youth, before had stopped in indecision, in the midst of Most importantly, he questions his certainties he became Pierre Loti. chaos.6 In their exile, in being uprooted, and considers his cultural habits with a great Lotis characters are sensitive to a change in perspective. When deal of distance, as if what was familiar was also strange to him. the narrator of Madame Chrysanthme (1887) arrives in Japan, he Like Loti, you too came to write of lexotisme du proche, observes that his usual understanding of space does not equip him the exoticism of the familiar, the phrase a French critic uses to for grasping the landscape he discovers; he needs another scale, describe Pierre Lotis regional French novels (Dupont 13). For and another world view, to understand Japan: indeed, it seems example, in Iceland Fisherman, the hero Yann has an expensive gold that the absence of distance, of perspective, allows us to observe all watch that he brought back from a southern French city, and the the details of this minute, intimate, wet and muddy piece of Japan narrator remarks that such an elaborate watch seems misplaced in under our eyes.7 Jim Burden in My ntonia has the feeling that the primitive surroundings of the stark fishing expeditions: Yet the world was left behind (7) when he arrives in Nebraska, while this banality of civilized life stood out in the midst of the primitive 3 Lotis Breton characters probe the limits of their understanding, men, surrounded as they were by the great silences of the sea. The in the uncomfortable experience of being uprooted. great silences of the sea was Lotis resonating chamber to praise the sailors glory, and while the watch singles out Yann from the crowd, his use of the word primitive carries the primary nobility of the common man in his essential work. You also decided to extol the glory and endurance of simple folks from your earliest stories on. In your story A Wagner Matine (1904) the narrator looks at his aunt and experiences this exoticism of the familiar abruptly: I saw my aunts battered figure with that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers who have left their ears and fingers north of Franz Joseph Land, or their health somewhere along the Upper Congo (236). His aunts endurance is displaced to the geographic extremes of the Arctic or the Equator. You also detected exoticism in the obscure destinies and talents for living of ordinary folks. Like Loti, you paid attention to physical details that become emblematic of hardship, resilience, generosity, of life-giving nurture. You had the same affectionate proximity and the right dose of estrangement to see things both from within and as if from the moon. Your exoticism does not turn the sitters into objects of fantasy but glorifies them for their own sake. You achieved that goal only after a wrench, like that of Lotis heroine Gaud in Iceland Fisherman. In a passage which must have rung a bell because you had a similar experience when you were 36 The narrator of Madame Chrysanthme also conveys the new smells of the country he discovers, and finally realizes that his language and the categories contained in his language no longer apply to the reality he encounters: To narrate those evenings faithfully, one would need a more precious language; one would need a graphic sign made precisely for it, that could be inserted amongst the words, to indicate laughter for the reader, possibly forced laughter, yet still fresh and gracious enough.8 Sensitive as he was to foreignness, Loti may have been the first to give you, Willa, the authority to borrow foreign words and import their reality into your use of English, because they transcribe their world more faithfully than culturally faulty translations. Loti complained that he has been criticized for using foreign words but justified himself because borrowed words are the only adequate ones: Until now, I had always written his guitar to avoid exotic terms, which I have been reproached for using too often. But neither the word guitar nor the word mandolin can do justice to that thin instrument with an elongated neck, whose high notes are more sentimental than the voice of grasshoppers; from now on, I shall write shamisen.9 Although you mention Prosper Mrimes use of Spanish words in Carmen as an example, you seem to write under Lotis Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 justification when you rebuff Marguerite Yourcenar for her reluctance to incorporate Spanish words in her translation of your Death Comes for the Archbishop: Madame Yourcenar further told me that it would be impossible to use in her translation the local names of thingsi.e., nouns such as burro, mesa, adobe (both a noun and adjective), casa, arroyo, hacienda, etc., etc. These words were, of course, originally Spanish, but they are now common words everywhere in the southwest. All the American farmers and railroad workmen use them without knowing that they are Spanish. There are simply no other names for these things. You cannot call an arroyo a ditch or a ravine. (Letter to Alfred A. Knopf, April 19, 1938, Selected Letters 547) It is a famous rebuff, and I cannot help but enjoy the way you defend your position to a writer so well established in my country.10 Martin Heidegger, born sixteen years after you, engaged in a dialogue with a Japanese scholar about the limits of translation between such different traditions as Western and Eastern philosophies, concluding that we reach those things with which we are originally familiar precisely if we do not shun passing through things strange to us(33). You couldnt have been aware of this dialogue, which took place long after your death, and you may prefer Kiplings witty chiasmus in The English Flag anyway, which expresses a similar idea: And what should they know of England who only England know? (42). Constantinople, 1904. Like Lotis, your simple country folks knew America well because they often knew it from other vantage points, or from the many different Old World customs they encountered within the same county in Nebraska. They too tested their limits and their certainties or insecurities, and for that they were heroes and heroines in their own glory, which had nothing to envy the heroic deeds of antiquity. Like Loti, you shaped your heroines in the classic tradition, recognizing in telling domestic details of hairdressing or attitude their heroic qualities. When Lotis Gaud gets undressed in the seclusion of her bedroom, she takes off her corset, a troublesome Parisian fashion, and the narrator finds her waist more perfect when free, likening her to a marble statue.11 In this instance, the narrator observes her like your Don Hedger does Eden Bower exercising naked in her room in Coming, Aphrodite! (1920). Gaud wears her hair braided and pulled up into rolls above her ears,12 and Loti writes that then, with her straight profile, she looked like a Roman virgin.13 In www.WillaCather.org O Pioneers! (1913), Alexandra is first noticed for her hair; she has two thick braids, pinned about her head in the German way, with a fringe of reddish-yellow curls blowing out from under her cap, and an observers exclamation of praise is met with disdain: She stabbed him with a glance of Amazonian fierceness and drew in her lower lipmost unnecessary severity (15). Gaud is similarly self-determined. Her marriage turns into widowhood immediately, as she is virtuously single like Alexandra, and she too becomes a creator giving shape to life, although not as a pioneer woman cultivating the land, but rather as a talented and much sought-after dressmaker in her village, much like Lena Lingard in My ntonia. In One of Ours (1922), you describe, like Loti, a trajectory of estrangement within ones own culture, of an uprooting and looping quest that leads the main characters self-discovery after having experienced life in another land. Claude Wheeler finds himself in France, after his disastrous marriage to Enid Royce in Nebraska. He becomes a hero when he leads the charge in battle, much like Sylvestre in Lotis Iceland Fisherman, who charges ahead and saves six other sailors during a fight in Hanoi. Sylvestre is first described as having found himself in his new environment, far from home: The last few days, he had begun his transfiguration: his skin had tanned, his voice had changed, he now stood in his own element.14 He is wounded, mortally, during his heroic charge, a charge described as the kind that gave common men the supreme courage, that made antique heroes of them.15 Did you model Claudes final charge after Sylvestres to reveal the heroism of plain, unobtrusive men who have gone far overseas to test their mettle? Once dead, Claude Wheeler returns home in spirit for his mother and for Mahailey, who speaks for him when she calls his mother Mudder because for Mahailey, his spirit, like God, is always near, directly overhead, not so very far above the kitchen stove (606). Because we critics gathered at this conference in Rome read you closely, for us too you are not so very far above the kitchen stove, or above our desk, or wherever we may be. We feel close to your works and find them inexhaustible, despite the passage of time and multiple readings. Often, we tend to see life through your lenses and read it through your beautiful wording of the world. Please dont be offended. Critics like to probe the secrets of creation, whether it stems from any influence or not, and we admire a beautiful turn of phrase when it just clicks with what it 37 says like magic. We find this as erotic as the intimacy of an alcove. And please dont blush, dear Willa, for all this praise. Please accept this personal letter of thanks for your gift to the world. Thanks to you, coming home with a memory of the looped journey makes sense, as your character Jim Burden recognizes in My ntonia: I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle mans experience is (360). Farewell, wherever you are, and look kindly on us. Admiringly yours, from Rome, Franoise NOTES 1. See Richard M. Berrong, Willa Cathers Intertextualization of Pierre Lotis Icelandic Fisherman in O Pioneers! Willa Cather Newsletter & Review 57.1 (Spring 2014): 8. 2. See Maupassants tales. 3. Cependant cette banalit de la vie civilise dtonnait beaucoup au milieu de ces hommes primitifs, avec ces grands silences de la mer quon devinait autour deux(58). All translations from Loti into English are mine, to respect the current translation standards that previous English translations did not have. 4 ce jour darrive, elle avait t surprise dune faon pnible par lpret de cette Bretagne, revue en plein hiver(77). 5 aspects de non vie, de monde fini ou pas encore cr(97). 6 il semblait plutt quelque pauvre plante jaune, mourante, qui se serait arrte l indcise, au milieu dun chaos (102). 7. vraiment il semble que cette absence de lointains, de perspectives, dispose mieux remarquer tous les dtails de ce trs petit bout de Japon intime, boueux et mouill, que nous avons sous les yeux (ebook 14742/34719). 8. Pour raconter fidlement ces soires-l, il faudrait un langage plus manir que le ntre; il faudrait aussi un signe graphique invent exprs, que lon mettrait au hasard parmi les mots, et qui indiquerait au lecteur le moment de pousser un clat de rire,un peu forc, mais cependant frais et gracieux (ebook 15233/34719). 9. Jusqu prsent, javais toujours crit sa guitare pour viter ces termes exotiques dont on ma reproch labus. Mais ni le mot guitare ni le mot mandoline ne dsignent bien cet instrument mince avec un si long manche, dont les notes hautes sont plus mivres que la voix des sauterelles; partir de maintenant, jcrirai chamcen (ebook 16432/34719). 10. Yourcenar was the first woman to be elected a member of lAcadmie franaise, as late as in 1980, when she was 77 years old. She liked your country so much she choose to live on Mount Desert Island, but had not been as adventurous as you and had not visited the Southwest when the two of you met. Both of you 38 must have had a whiff of the others determination and talent, under the veneer of propriety and good manners. 11. Alors sa taille, une fois libre, devint plus parfaite; ntant plus comprime, ni trop amincie par le bas, elle reprit ces lignes naturelles, qui taient pleines et douces comme celles des statues en marbre; ses mouvements en changeaient les aspects, et chacune de ses poses tait exquise regarder (9394). 12. nattes enroules au-dessus de ses oreilles comme deux serpents trs lourds; en couronne sur le haut de sa tte (94). 13. alors, avec son profil droit, elle ressemblait une vierge romaine (94). 14. Dj transfigur depuis quelques jours, bronz, la voix change, il tait l comme dans un lment lui (161). 15. celle qui donne aux simples le courage surprme, celle qui faisait les hros antiques (162). WORKS CITED Cather, Willa. My ntonia. 1918. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. Charles Mignon, Kari Ronning, James Woodress, Kathleen Danker, and Emily Levine. Lincoln, U of Nebraska P, 1995. .O Pioneers! 1913. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. Susan J. Rosowski, Charles W. Mignon, Kathleen Danker, and David Stouck. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992. .One of Ours. 1922. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed Richard Harris, Frederick M. Link, and Kari A. Ronning. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2006. .Sapphira and the Slave Girl. 1940. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition.Ed.Ann Romines,CharlesW. Mignon,KariA.Ronning, and Frederick M. Link. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2009. .The Selected Letters of Willa Cather. Ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout. New York: Knopf, 2013. .Youth and the Bright Medusa. 1920. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. Mark J. Madigan, Frederick M. Link, Charles W. Mignon, Judith Boss, and Kari A. Ronning. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2009. De Goncourt, Edmond and Jules. Journal. Vol. 2. Paris: Robert Laffont, Collection Bouquins, 1989. Dupont, Jacques. Prface. Pcheur dIslande. Collection Folio classique. Paris: Gallimard, 1988. Heidegger, Martin. A Dialogue on Language: Between a Japanese and an Inquirer. In On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. 1971. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. 154. Kipling, Rudyard. Poems. London: Everymans Library, 2007. Loti, Pierre. Pcheur dIslande. Collection Folio classique. Paris: Gallimard, 1988. .Les incontournables de Pierre Loti. Les 15 uvres majeures et compltes de Pierre Loti. E-book Kindle Edition, 2013. De Maupassant, Guy. Contes de la main gauche. Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1889. Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 What Is There about Us Always: The Archbishop and Willa Cathers [Roman] Catholic Imagination Diane Prenatt | Marian University Like many longtime readers of Willa Cather, I often find myself confirmed (3031); at Manuel Lujons place, Vaillant performs marriages and baptisms (59, 65); Latour expects to find a confirmation class at Padre Gallegoss parish in Albuquerque (86); Vaillant administers the last rites to Father Lucero (179) and rides to the Hopi Indians, marrying, baptizing, confessing as he went (211); Archbishop Latour receives the Viaticum on his last day of life (314). responding to the assumptions of new readers to say that no, Cather was not a Catholic, but yes, it is certainly understandable to have thought she was. What makes it so understandable is the accuracy of Cathers depiction of Catholic culture in Shadows on the Rock (1931), the brief but memorable scenes relating to Catholic practice and belief in O Pioneers! (1913), My ntonia The belief that these sacraments, (1918), One of Ours (1922), and The administered through ordinary Professors House (1925), andmost substances like oil, salt, water, and bread, convincinglythe comprehending grant the recipient access to the grace portrait of Archbishop Latour in of God reflects the belief that matter Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). matters, as the contemporary Catholic We can readily understand Cathers theologian John E. Thiel puts it (46). The affinity with Catholicism when we belief in sacramentality, Thiel explains, is a reflect upon her deep affection for belief in the capacity of created matter to France, her preference for legend as a mediate the grace and love, the providence narrative mode, and her appreciation and salvation of God (47); the Christian for the ritualistic nature of quotidian faith distinctively claims that salvation acts. She was a serious reader of Dante is mediated through the created order and may have extended her knowledge or the physical world (46). Christians of Catholic theology through reading believe that God, in the person of Jesus 1 A page from December Night, a scene from Death Comes Aquinas. Cathers representation of Christ, redeems them in and through for the Archbishop, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1933 Catholic belief, however, runs deeper created being, not in spite of it or as an (1926, 1927, 1929 by Willa Cather). than her observant depiction of the escape from it (46).2 Incarnational is often used interchangeably with sacramental to describe this Catholic culture of immigrants and her familiarity with doctrine; it is intimately and meaningfully connected to the quality of her belief, in which the incarnation of God in the human person of imagination, to her depiction of the constant interchange between Jesus Christ is the fundamental manifestation of the sacrality of the transcendent and the mundane that Catholic theology defines the created order. The contemporary Catholic theologian David as the sacramental world. Tracy points out that the doctrine of sacramentality, developed by Catholic theologians from Bonaventure to Teilhard de Chardin, To recognize that Death Comes for the Archbishop depicts a means that [t]he entire world, the ordinary in all its variety, is sacramental world, or that the novel is informed by a sacramental now theologically envisioned as sacrament (413). The Catholic world view, is to say something more than the fact that it includes theologian William L. Portier draws upon Mircea Eliades notion scenes in which the two priests, Jean Marie Latour and Joseph of the sacred and the profane to explicate his own discussion of Vaillant, administer the sacraments of the Roman Catholic the sacramental world view. For Eliade, Portier states, every aspect Church. To note those many scenes, however, is to realize how of the profane is a potential medium for the manifestation of the thoroughly Cathers story inhabits a world in which theological sacred. The capacity of the visible world to body forth the invisible doctrine is enacted physically. At Agua Secreta, where he found . . . gives his approach a striking affinity with the incarnational/ refuge after his prayer before the cruciform juniper, Latour performed marriages and baptisms and heard confessions and sacramental ethos of Roman Catholicism (62). www.WillaCather.org 39 The Catholic imaginative conflation of ordinary and sacramental is profoundly symbolic; theologically, it was formulated as the doctrine of analogy by Thomas Aquinas (Tracy 413). Portier categorically states, The holy never appears directly, but through a non-sacred or profane medium. . . . [T]he holy is symbolically mediated (63; original emphasis). David Tracy theorizes a Catholic imagination that tends to be analogical as opposed to a Protestant imagination that tends to be dialectical. Andrew Greeley, the Jesuit sociologist and novelist, uses Tracys definitions to explain why American Catholics imagine differently from American Protestantswhy, as he puts it, Flannery OConnor is not John Updike (34). Greeley simplifies Tracys definitions somewhat to describe the Protestant dialectical imagination, which assume[s] a God who is radically absent from the world. . . . The world and all its events, objects, and people tend to be radically different from God, whom we must go somewhere else to find; and the Catholic analogical imagination, which assume[s] a God who is present in the world, disclosing Himself in and through creation. The world and all its events, objects, and people tend to be somewhat like God (45). Although Greeley is mostly interested in the way these imaginative differences affect Catholic and Protestant social codes and behaviors, he follows Tracy and Portier in attributing the analogical imagination to a belief in the sacramental or incarnational world. Thus, in the Roman Catholic world of Death Comes for the Archbishop, the cruciform juniper tree, before which Latour prays when he is lost in the New Mexico desert, is both profane tree and holy crucifix. Latoura man who was sensitive to the shape of things (17)recognizes that living vegetation could not present more faithfully the form of the Cross (18), and so he performs his devotions no differently from the way he would at the foot of a crucifix in a French cathedral. In Portiers terms, the holy symbol of Christian redemption appears through the profane medium of the tree. Latour is thereby granted providential gracethe intervening action of God in his lifeleading him to Agua Secreta, where he finds himself resting in comfort and safety, with love for his fellow creatures flowing like peace about his heart, his feverish thirst quenched (30). Latour knows that this dramatic turn of events is what Joseph Vaillant would call a miracle and reflects that Vaillant likes his miracles spectacular, not with Nature, but against it (30); whereas it is Latours belief that miracles rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always (54). In Tracys and Greeleys terms, Latours notion of the miraculous is an almost purely Catholic recognition of God disclosing himself through the created order, 40 while Vaillants, in contrast, tends toward the dialectical Protestant imagination: Vaillants encounter with God, as Latour describes it, is outside the created order. Latour characteristically conflates the transcendent and the mundane, the sacred and profane: As he had a very special way of handling objects that were sacred, he extended that manner to things which he considered beautiful (252). Cather thus attributes Latours highly developed aesthetic perception not only to his French cultural formation, but to his theological belief system. It has its source in his enacted belief in the sacramentality of the world without which those rituals he performs as a priest would be simply fetishistic and his personal aesthetic merely precious. Nicolas Poussin: Sacrament of Ordination (Christ Presenting the Keys to St. Peter) (detail), 16361642; Kimbell Art Museum. The belief in the sacramentality of the world is consummately expressed in the doctrine of the Incarnation (Thiel 46). As Thiel states, If the doctrine of creation is the language of Christian sacramentality, then the doctrine of the Incarnation is its more explicit grammar (47). In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather affirms the centrality of the Incarnation by locating two almost unutterably beautiful scenes with reference to Christmas, the point in the liturgical calendar that commemorates the Incarnation. The first of these is the description of Latours and Vaillants Christmas dinner in The Bishop Chez Lui and the second is Latours Advent encounter with Sada in December Night. In these two scenes, the most ordinary human needs for food, clothing, and shelterare satisfied by ordinary objects from the physical world (onions, chicken, potatoes; a cloak; the roofed space of a church) which are transformed sacramentally in the context of the Incarnation. The Bishops Christmas dinner resonates with sacramental symbology. The meal is sacramentalized by the presence of Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 candles, including those in the silver candlesticks Latour received as an ordination gift, and the smell of pion logs burning in the fireplace, which Latour compares to incense. The olive oil that dresses Father Vaillants homely Christmas salad is the same oil traditionally used to anoint recipients of the Catholic sacraments. Father Vaillants fretful chatter about his cooking is a mild reminder of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation (the Eucharistic change of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ): the transformation of the humble foods native to the American Southwest into a French Christmas dinner has not been easy. In celebration of the dayin celebration of the Incarnationthe two priests converse in their native French, a rare indulgence that intensifies their own relational communion and reaffirms their identity and their commitment to their vocations. The meal and the conversation also place the two men in relationship with the communion of saints, the community of all believers living and dead, including Frenchmen who have participated in the thousand-year constantly refined tradition (41) of the soup that begins their meal. Thus, common materials of the created orderonions, dried plums, a good enough wine with a slight taste of the cork (42)mediate the transmission of grace, the spiritual enrichment of the two priests. The salvific function of thoughtfully prepared food is a recurrent motif in Death Comes for the Archbishop. Later in the novel, Latour observes, Time and again [he] had seen a good dinner, a bottle of claret, transformed into spiritual energy [in Father Vaillant] under his very eyes (238). As the great feast is prepared at the Lujon place, Father Vaillant insists on roasting his gigot rare not only because he is a Frenchman (60), but because he wants the blood of the Lamb. Bishop Latours encounter with Sada likewise evokes the doctrine of the Incarnation. It takes place during Advent, the period of time that commemorates the anticipation of the birth of Christ. Inside the churchin the Lady Chapel, dedicated to the mother of the incarnate Godwhere Latour lights candles before the statue of the Holy Mother (224), Sada weeps tears of ecstasy at seeing the holy things of the altar (what the Catholic Church calls sacramentals) after being kept from church for nineteen years by her abusive employers (224). As Sada murmurs, O Sacred Heart of Mary, Latour feels how that name was food and raiment, friend and mother to her. (228). He understands what it means to Sada to know that there was a kind Woman in Heaven, though there were such cruel ones on earth. . . . Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer (228). The contemporary American Catholic writer Mary Gordon has observed, It is one of the marvels of a Catholic education that the impulse of a few words can bring whole narratives to light with an immediacy and a clarity that are utterly absorbing (288). www.WillaCather.org In this episode, Sadas Advent devotion to Mary, as Latour shares it, brings to light the narrative of the Incarnation that provides the basis for the imaginative experience of the sacramental world. For as Andrew Greeley explains, . . . Mary is the defining image for the Sacramental Imagination, that image which most sharply distinguishes . . . the Catholic tradition from other Christian traditions. . . . Mary is essential to Catholicism, not perhaps on the level of doctrine but surely on the level of imagination, because she more than any other image blatantly confirms the sacramental instinct: the whole of creation and all its processes, especially its lifegiving and life-nurturing processes, reveal the lurking and passionate love of God. (253) December Night is only one of many references to Mary as the mother of God throughout Death Comes for the Archbishop that illuminate the incarnational narrative underlying Latours sacramental world view. Both Latour and Vaillant are dedicated to Mary, their Gracious Patroness (211). Cather has given Latour the middle name of Marienot unusual for French men (it was Voltaires middle name, too)but a purposeful choice, as the historic Bishop Jean Lamys middle name was Baptiste. Father Vaillant, who wears a signet ring inscribed Auspice Maria (under the protection of Mary), cherishes the hope that one day he will lead a contemplative life of devotion to the Holy Mother; for the time being, he tells Latour, he will serve Her in action (43). It is to the Holy Mother Latour prays before the cruciform tree and he knows that Vaillant would believe it was she who took the mare by the bridle and delivered him to Agua Secreta (30), where he was met by Josephas greeting, Ave Mara Pursima, Seor (24). Latour notices the santos in Benitos house, especially the sorrowing mother, so different from the plaster images of the Virgin he found in churches in Ohio (28). Relaxing before his Christmas dinner, Latour hums softly Ave Maris Stella (Hail, Star of the Sea), a vespers hymn to Mary (39); later in the novel, Father Vaillant invokes the compline hymn, Alma redemptoris mater (Fair Mother of the Redeemer; 211). Early in the novel, when the Bishop has just returned from Durango, he is awakened by the ringing of the Angelus, a Marian devotion (45). The story of Our Lady of Guadalupe is inset in the novel (4952), told to Latour by an elderly priest who had finally made a pilgrimage to the shrine commemorating the appearance of Mary in the new world. The Marian narrative underscores the sacramental quality of the garden scene several years after Latour and Vaillants Christmas dinner. Bishop Latour is working in his garden as Father Vaillant lies on a cot nearby recuperating from malaria in the month of 41 Cather historicizes the significance of Mary in the Catholic tradition by invoking the courtly love tradition that is the legacy of the interchange between Catholics and Muslims during the Crusades. In this tradition, Mary is the divine analogy for the unattainable earthly woman whose favor the chivalric lover seeks. Latour recognizes the origins of the Angelus in the Crusades (48). He is described as a man of gentle birth. . . . He had a kind of courtesy (18). Lujon calls Vaillant a caballero (cavalier or knight; 63), identifying him with the chivalric tradition. Latour displays courtliness toward Doa Isabella, kissing her hand (202). In these scenes, Latour and is Vaillant perform as Frenchmen, but their behavior, as Cather depicts it, is inseparable from their religious faith.3 Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, 18481849; Tate Britain. Rossettis model for the Virgin Mary in this, his first completed oil painting, was his sister, the poet Christina Rossetti. Mary and the month of May (208). As the grass under foot had a reflection of blue sky in it (209), so the earthly garden illustrates a heavenly analog: it is both a practical orchard and kitchen-garden, the fruits of which supplement the starchy diet of Latours Mexican parishioners (278), and, in its beauty and variety, a metaphor for the Biblical Eden. Latour likes to remind his students of that passage from . . . Pascal: that Man was lost and saved in a garden (279), a reference to the doctrine of the felix culpa (fortunate fall), the belief that Adam and Eves fall from innocence occasioned the happy event of the incarnation of Jesus Christ and his redemption of human beings. The garden is thus emblematic of the incarnate world. As the iconographic hortus conclusus (enclosed garden), it is also a symbol of Mary inviolate. All the most important events in [Vaillants] own history had occurred in the blessed month when this sinful and sullied world puts on white as if to commemorate the Annunciation (213), Cather writes. The Catholic Church commemorates the Annunciation not in May, however, but on March 25nine months before the Incarnation. This isnt a mistake Latour would have made; the Incarnation seems to have been on Cathers mind. 42 Cathers representation of the sacramental world, of the analogical imagination, extends beyond the facility with metaphor that we expect from good literature. Her frequent choice to feature Catholic characters and culture draws attention to her own imaginative and perceptual processes. There are many unanswered questions about Cathers spirituality, but she does seem to have longed for a world, which she thought once existed historically, that accommodates transcendence and sacrality. Her longing is related to her rejection of the kind of data-driven realist literature she decries in The Novel Dmeubl. When we talk today about the materialism Cather disdained, we seem to be talking about consumerism or even simply bad taste. But materialism, understood philosophically, is a system in which the spiritual, the ephemeral do not exist. The innovation of the positivist sciences was to correct an unquestioning, faith-dependent world view. There is no space in literary realism as formulated by Zola for the emotional penumbra of things (The Novel Dmeubl 48). In contrast to Emile Zola, who wrote a novel debunking Marys apparition at Lourdes, who would say with the realist painter Gustave Courbet, Show me an angel and Ill paint you an angel, Cather paints worlds that presume the existence of the miraculous and numinous, in which transcendence is not another place but is a quality apparent to perceptions . . . made finer. In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Latours perceptions of his world are conflated with the narrators own. Often, Cather does not trouble to create any distance between Latour, as the center of consciousness, and her narratoras in the description of the landscape between Laguna and coma, which looks as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together . . . (100). It is easy to assume that Cathers imagination shared the analogical quality of Latours, whether or not she shared his doctrinal beliefs. Her depiction of the Catholic sacramental or incarnational worldview corresponds to Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 representations of embodiment that recur throughout her fiction. Cather often locates a transcendent consciousness in the human body, as she does, for example in The Song of the Lark, when Thea begins to understand the Indian women potters by imagining herself in their physical space, walking as they must have, babies on their backs. Theas epiphanic understanding that art contains life itself occurs when she baptizes herself with water in Panther Canyon (273). In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Magdalenas very body has changed (220) once she has been redeemed from her degraded life with Buck Scales. Furthermore, throughout her fiction, Cathers typical symbol-making endows elements of the created order with a transcendence, a sacrality, that corresponds to the Catholic doctrine of sacramentality. In Shadows on the Rock (1931), for example, the ordinary articles of housekeepingbrooms and brushes and copper potsbecome almost sacramentalized in their creative function of making life itself (227). Throughout Death Comes for the Archbishop, Latour displays an authentically Catholic imagination precisely because he perceives an interchange, an analogy rather than a binary difference, between the sacred and the profane: he accepts the suffering of agonizing thirst by comparing it to the Passion of Christ (19); he celebrates the Edenic origins of the garden (279); he compares being led out of the sand-hills of the desert to the flight into Egypt (30); he compares the vast incompleteness of the mesa to the Biblical act of Creation (100); the rock of coma reminds him of the apostle Peter (103). renovate and reoccupy their own tradition (33). Gioia states that although Roman Catholicism constitutes the largest religious and cultural group in the United States, Catholicism currently enjoys almost no positive presence in [American literature] (33); this, he contends, marks a major historical change from the mid-twentieth century, when American Catholic writers were widely reviewed, when their presence was enlarged by the British Catholic revival and a dynamic community of European Catholic writers like Franois Mauriac and Georges Bernanos (3536). Catholic writers are no longer a coherent community, Gioia laments; they are no longer willing to identify themselves as Catholic (37). They practice their faith privately and do not engage it in their writing. I understand Elie and Gioias consternation at finding no reflection of their own experience in the literary canon. But I wonder whether they might be missing something.4 In a 2002 essay in Commonweal, explaining his own decision to identify as a Catholic novelist, Peter Quinn discerns four elements present in any genuinely Catholic work of fiction: the communion of saints; sin, suffering, and redemption . . . grace; and the Incarnation (18; my emphasis). Yet despite Elies insistence that contemporary fiction dramatize matters of belief, despite Gioias urgent call to Catholic community and identity, neither one identifies l As someone who teaches American Catholic literature, Ive begun to attend to a conversation that is developing about its disappearance. In December 2012, Paul Elie, the author of a well-received critical study of American Catholic writers (The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, 2003), published an essay on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, entitled Has Fiction Lost Its Faith? in which he asserts that Christian belief figures into literary fiction in our place and time . . . as something between a dead language and a hangover (1). Despite the fact that the personal experience of religion figures in the fiction of Louise Erdrich, Alice McDermott, William Kennedy, Don DeLillo, Jeffrey Eugenides, and others, Elie points out, contemporary fiction generally demonstrates a refusal to grant belief any explanatory power, an inability to dramatize belief the way it feels in your experience, at once a fact on the ground and a sponsor of the uncanny, an account of our predicament that still and all has the old power to persuade (15). In a related essay in First Things (an interreligious journal aligned with neoconservative Roman Catholicism), Dana Gioia encourages Catholic writers to www.WillaCather.org Titian: Christ Blessing, c. 1570; the State Hermitage Museum. 43 the sacramental or incarnational worldviewor the analogical imaginationas a marker of Catholic fiction. Gioia mourns the contemporary Churchs neglect of its glorious physicality, its ability to convey its truths as incarnate (40), but he attributes it to a decline in Catholic visual art and music, and does not seek the same quality in literature. To notice the representation of the incarnate world in Catholic fiction, however, is to enlarge our understanding of what Catholic literature means. Gioia himself reminds us of Flannery OConnors pronouncement: The Catholic novelist doesnt have to be a saint; he doesnt even have to be a Catholic; he does, unfortunately, have to be a novelist (42). All of Quinns markers of Catholic fiction are present in Death Comes for the Archbishop, but it is the pervasive representation of sacramentality, of the analogical imagination, that invites us to include Cather in the eclipsed tradition Elie and Gioia lament. We might question whether that tradition is eclipsed after all, for surely Cather is not alone in writing toward a transcendent and sacred world in which, our perceptions being made finer . . . our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always. NOTES 1. For an analysis of the influence of Dantes Divine Comedy on Cathers spiritual quest novels, including Death Comes for the Archbishop, see John J. Murphys Cathers New World Divine Comedy: The Dante Connection in Cather Studies 1 (1990) 2135. 2. Although Thiel ecumenically uses the word Christian in defining Roman Catholic belief, not all Christian denominations share the Catholic definition of sacrament. Most Protestant denominations recognize only two sacraments, baptism and communion; some, like the Quakers, recognize none. There is also considerable difference among Christian theologies regarding the efficacy of the sacraments, including the Catholic belief (originating with Augustine) that sacraments confer grace, and various Protestant views that sacraments affirm a state of grace that has already been attained by the recipient. 3. Cathers depiction of French and Bohemian Catholic culture in O Pioneers! (1913) indicates her early interest in the connection between the chivalric tradition and Marian devotion. The young farm boys on horseback, who ride out to meet the bishop come to administer confirmation at Sainte-Agns, longed for a Jerusalem to deliver (226), and they remind the bishop that the Church still has her cavalry (227). Emil Bergson, who had dressed as a caballero for the church fair, resolves to act on his 44 love for Marie Shabata when he is transported by Raoul Marcels performance of Gounods Ave Maria during the confirmation Mass (22829). Even Amde Chevaliers surname is a reminder of the chivalric tradition. 4. One thing both men are missing is any acknowledgement of the contemporary American novelist, memoirist, and essayist Mary Gordon, who figures prominently in Catholic literary and political discourse. (See, for example, her August 2014 contribution to Harpers, Francis and the Nuns: Is the New Vatican All Talk? as well as novels like Pearl (2006), a treatment of hunger striking in Ireland informed by the beliefs of Simone Weil.) Elie and Gioias omissions of any reference to her are incomprehensible. WORKS CITED Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. 1927. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. John J. Murphy, Charles W. Mignon, Frederick M. Link and Kari A. Ronning. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. .The Novel Dmeubl. 1922. Not Under Forty. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988. .Shadows on the Rock. 1931. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. John J. Murphy, David Stouck, Frederick M. Link. Lincoln:U of Nebraska P, 2006. .The Song of the Lark. 1915. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. Ann Moseley and Kari A. Ronning. Lincoln:U of Nebraska P, 2012. Elie, Paul. Has Fiction Lost Its Faith? New York Times Book Review December 23, 2012: 1, 1415. Gioia, Dana. The Catholic Writer Today. First Things December 2013. 3343. Gordon, Mary. Final Payments. New York: Random House, 1978. Greeley, Andrew M. The Catholic Myth: The Behavior and Beliefs of American Catholics. New York: Scribners, 1990. Murphy, John J. Cathers New World Divine Comedy: The Dante Connection. Cather Studies 1 (1990) 2129. Portier, William L. Tradition and Incarnation: Foundations of Christian Theology. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1994. Quinn, Peter. The Catholic Novel: Fact or Fiction? Commonweal. November 8, 2002: 1621. Thiel, John E. Creation, Contingency, and Sacramentality. CTSA [Catholic Theology Society of America] Proceedings 67. 2012. Tracy, David. The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism. New York: Crossroad, 1981. Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 Fair Rosamond and Fierce Rosamund: European Models for the Older Daughter in The Professors House Peter M. Sullivan Critical approaches to Willa Cathers 1925 novel The Professors House have focused on the notion that this work more than others illustrates Cathers modernist views, expressing her disillusionment with the consumer culture and the loss of noble values that defined Americas past. Her much-cited comment that for her the world had broken in two expressed a pessimism and sense of loss that would endure for years. Yet, Cather was experiencing literary and commercial successes; prior to the appearance of The Professors House she been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her war novel One of Ours, and had also published the well-received novel A Lost Lady, both providing income that allowed a comfortable lifestyle. Cather, as scholars have noted, was not averse to luxury, and participated in the consumer culture. Among the approaches to reading The Professors House, ecological interpretations, such as that of Kelsey Squire, have focused on the aesthetic appreciation of and attachment to place, which can be diminished, by conspicuous consumption and cosmopolitanism. Further addressing the consumer culture, Richard Harris discusses parallels between early novels of Chicagoan Henry Blake Fuller and The Professors House, finding that Cather likely drew on Fuller for themes and characters that illustrate the impact of conspicuous consumption on family values. As David Harrell theorizes, a focus on Cathers attraction to the Southwest, the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, and Cathers travels in Arizona and New Mexico is central to Tom Outlands Story, the key to the novel. James Woodress, in his Historical Essay in the Scholarly Edition of the novel, agrees, and discusses its many different sources (Harrell 6; The Professors House 297 316). But remarks made by Cather herself to close friends offer another, fascinating perspective. Writing to Irene Miner Weisz on February 17, 1925, Cather expresses her pleasure that Irene had read the manuscript and got at once the really fierce feeling that lies behind the rather dry and impersonal manner of the telling (Selected Letters 366). And in a letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher later that year Cather sounds a cautionary note, referring to the novel as a nasty, grim little tale . . . (Selected Letters 375). With these remarks she hints at the bitter feelings underlying relationships in the family of protagonist Godfrey St. Peter, a professor at a small Midwestern college. www.WillaCather.org Edward Burne-Jones: Fair Rosamund and Queen Eleanor,1861; Yale Center for British Art. Although the Professor, whose multivolume work Spanish Adventurers in North America established his scholarly reputation, shows an abiding affection for his daughters, tensions persist. The younger Kathleen, married to newspaper man Scott McGregor, leads a modest existence, while older daughter Rosamond and husband Louie Marsellus, made wealthy by the commercial exploitation of a patent inherited by Rosamond, are furnishing a new mansion and can afford a limousine. The Professor is repelled by his older daughters insensitivity and her blatant acquisitiveness, which also remain a source of friction between the sisters. In discussing the novel Woodress does not offer prototypes for Rosamond or Kathleen, though Harris suggests a possible model for Rosamond in a Fuller novel. 45 As Cathers descriptions of the Professors older daughter and her name suggest, a further search for models clearly lead to the European tradition. she is insecure in her relationship with the king. Surrounded by rose blossoms in the maze at Woodstock, she sits alone, sensitive to the worlds gossip. Recalling the kings adulation, though, she considers herself and that of the world about her in terms of beauty, the ultimate value Swinburne associates with love (40). According to Swinburnes aestheticism, it is beauty that can assure love and salvation. In the small town of Hamilton where the family resides, there has long been consensus about the striking beauty of the Professors older daughter, suggesting a legendary beauty of the same name, Rosamund de Clifford. Known as Fair Rosamond Several of Fair Rosamonds qualities are reminiscent of or Rose of the World, derived from Latin rosa mundi, this the Professors older daughter, Rosamond Marsellus. She too English noblewoman became the mistress of King Henry II, the is particularly aware of her beauty, and is reminded of it by an spouse of Eleanor of Aquitaine. (While most scholarly sources admiring husband, giving her a high level of self-esteem. And spell her name Rosamund, this historical person has become just as the kings paramour is held Rosamond in legendthat is, at the lodge at Woodstock, the the spelling Cather usesso that older daughter will be kept at the is how I will refer to her here.) couples new mansion, behind Legends emphasize a jealous wrought-iron door fittings (40), rivalry between Rosamond and hinges and latches that her husband the older queen, one indicating Louie has ordered installed that Rosamond was poisoned by everywhere, rather than the more Eleanor, although few of the stories popular Colonial glass knobs can be substantiated. Rosamond, it (40). Rosamond, metaphorically, is said, remained at the kings estate will become a trophy of the at Woodstock, which the king had extravagant Louie, whose name surrounded by a garden that was echoes the French monarchs of the actually a labyrinth. (Built, it was Ancien Rgime, hinting at royalty; said, to keep Eleanors spies from and appropriately the Professor discovering the liaison, but equally Charles Landseer: Assassination of Alboin, King of the Lombards, considers Louies suggested offer effective in physically containing 1856; private collection. of a trip to France at his expense the beautiful paramour.) When a princely invitation (159). Louie comments that Rosamond Rosamond died she was buried at Godstow Nunnery, where her does not really care about the intrinsic value of the gifts he has tomb in front of the high altar became a popular shrine; on a given her, saying that to her a gift must be beautiful, first of all visit to the church, however, Bishop Hugh of Lincoln ordered (106). Thus, Cathers Rosamond, like Swinburnes heroine, prizes that because of Rosamonds sinful example her remains be beauty, but is more attracted to desirable, material things. removed to the cemetery (Rosamond, New Britannica 10, 179; Abbott; Matthews). Since the late Middle Ages the story of Fair A further motif in the novel suggests the paramour of the Rosamond has received literary treatment in prose and poetry, English king. As the Professor looks at one of the wire forms left including a well-known drama by Algernon Charles Swinburne in his study that once held dresses for his young daughters, it is (18371909), a favorite author of Cathers. mentioned that At times the wire lady was most convincing in Swinburnes drama, Rosamond, appeared in 1860 and reveals his early attraction to medieval romance and courtly love themes. Though the play has been dismissed by critics as a mere Pre-Raphaelite exercise, it is inspired by Swinburnes passion for the traditions of troubadour poetry (Harrison 37). In Swinburnes play, Rosamond, mistress of Henry II, espouses a religion of love, conceiving herself as a beautiful woman like the famous ones of antiquity who inspired potentially destructive passions. Though Rosamond is enchanted with her own beauty, 46 her pose as a woman of light behaviour, but she never fooled St. Peter. He had . . . never been taken in by one of her kind! (19). St. Peter even visualizes the form descending the stairs to dance a waltz. This motif recurs as Louie comments at a dinner party that his wife is Tom Outlands virtual widow (42); and while on their way home Louies brother-in-law, Scott McGregor, asks his wife Kathleen sarcastically, Now what the hell is a virtual widow? Does he mean a virtuous widow, or the reverseous? Bang, bang! (46), a comment resembling one of Scotts newspaper jingles. Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 This biting humor implies Rosamonds meretricious behavior in allowing the usurper Louie to exploit the patent she inherited from her dead fianc, Tom Outland. As such, the allusions to questionable morals in the novel hint at parallels between the older daughter and Henrys Fair Rosamond, known to history and legend as a beautiful concubine. And husband Louie even chides Rosamond for being naughty (164) when she asserts that Scott blackballed him from serving on a committee in their country club, but Louie then admits: I love her when shes naughty (167). But the fierceness underlying relationships that Cather mentioned in her letters suggests another, very different prototype with a similar name. A noblewoman born in the sixth century, Rosamund was a princess of the Gepids, a Germanic tribe that fought wars against the Lombards. (Rosamund is the usual spelling for the sixth century noblewoman.) Recognizing this group as a long-standing enemy, Alboin, the Lombard king, allied himself with the Avars, a people to the east of the Gepid kingdom, and in a pincer movement crushed the Gepids in a last battle. Alboin killed their leader, Cunimund, decapitating him; and the Gepids lost their identity as a tribe as they were subsumed under the Lombards, who invaded northern Italy. After the death of Alboins first wife he forced Rosamund to marry him. According to legend the cruel Alboin feasted at a banquet and passed around a cup that was made of the hollowed-out skull of Rosamunds father, compelling her to drink from it (Alboin New Britannica 1, 221). Grievously offended, the Lombard queen sought revenge. Rosamund had taken a lover, Helmechis, the kings arms bearer, and asked him to assassinate Alboin. Helmechis was not able to convince a strong man at court, Peredeo, to carry out the deed, thus it was arranged that Peredeo would have a liaison with a servant who was actually the disguised Rosamund. Soon realizing he had committed adultery with the kings wife, Peredeo agreed to do the killing. Rosamund assisted by having the kings sword tied to the bedpost so that he could not dislodge it, and when attacked the king could only ward off the assassin with a footstool and was slain. Rosamund later fled with Helmechis, whom she married, to the protection of the Byzantines in Ravenna. Here Rosamund came to favor the Byzantine prefect, Longinus, and devised a plan to murder her husband by poisoning him. The intended victim, though, swallowed only half the drink and forced Rosamund to imbibe the remainder, ending both their lives (Rosamond Omnilexica; Infoplease). A ghastly tale, it later became the subject of a Piedmontese folk song, Dona Lombarda (Marzo 4), and there were other treatments of the topic in the Italian language www.WillaCather.org including a drama by Vittorio Alfieri (17491803), a tragedy in five acts translated into English for an 1856 London stage performance (Alfieri). When Cather traveled to Italy in 1908 with Edith Lewis, she visited a monastery near Rome where she came upon the original code of the Lombard League, a twelfth century alliance of cities against the Holy Roman Emperor (Selected Letters 109). Cather was likely exposed to the history of the region and may have heard the story of the Lombard queen. But Cather had English language sources at her disposal, including the book titled Alboin and Rosamond and Lesser Poems by Robert Burton Rodney, appearing in 1870, and another play by Algernon Charles Swinburne titled Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards: a Tragedy. In Swinburnes 1899 drama Queen Rosamund, when forced to drink from the skull-cup, vows revenge. She arranges for her servant Hildegard to give up her maidenhood to the warrior Almachildes, but then takes her place. The queens evil plot becomes apparent as she threatens to have her servant burned at the stake as a harlot if Almachildes does not agree to murder the king. At a banquet Alboin promises to enshrine the skull-cup after everyone drinks from it once more. A poison mixture has been prepared for him, but Almachildes slays the king before he can drink it. Her revenge complete, Rosamund herself drinks from the cup, and a wise old man witnessing the scene pronounces this a horrid and hellish end, not of mans doing. Aspects of this gruesome account are suggested in Cathers The Professors House. Several references to skulls occur, including Kathleens taking note of the shape of her fathers head that she thinks makes him handsome; and in this description the head is said to be polished, hard as bronze, and throwing off a streak of light along the rounded ridge where the skull was the fullest (14), looking more like a statues head than a mans. Later, in Tom Outlands Story, the skulls of cliff dwellers are examined by Toms mentor Father Duchne, focusing on the likely intelligence of the ancient tribe. The related motif of decapitation appears at several places in the novel; while in his attic study the Professor observes the headless, armless female forms used for making his daughters dresses (18), and after the Professors grueling shopping trip with Rosamond, Mrs. St. Peter asks him if Rosamond lost her head? (153). He replies in the negative, adding that she was perfectly cool. And, as the story of the Lombard queen shows, it was not her but her father who lost his head. A similar colloquial expression occurs in Tom Outlands Story when the foreman warns Tom and Roddy not to let their cook Henry guard the cattle, because he lacks physical strength and hes got no head, meaning he had no experience with cattle and would not know 47 how to act at a critical moment (195). Roddy advises Henry that when crossing the chilling Cruzados River You have to keep your head (204); Henry is later killed on the mesa by a rattler striking him square in the forehead (215). Besides the allusions to skulls and phrases suggestive of decapitation there are references to special drinking cups. Kathleen mentions Amis and Amile (129), figures in the thirteenth century French romance Amis et Amiles who are given identical wooden cups adorned with gold and precious stones by the pope who baptized them; and these cups would later reveal one long-lost friend to the other (362). By contrast the skullcup that Alboin has fashioned represents a barbaric gesture and incites his wife to revenge. And as recalled by Tom Outland, at a Washington party someone spilt claret-cup on Mrs. Bixbys expensive skirt, causing her husband to emit a painful cry (232). These allusions hint at parallels with the story of the Lombard queen, and obliquely imply the harshness of the Professors older daughter. And added to the several gruesome motifs is that of extermination. As Tom learns from his mentor Father Duchne, the culture of the cliff dwellers was likely exterminated by aggressive bands of Indians, just as the native tribe of Queen Rosamund was crushed by the powerful Lombards, and no longer existed as an independent group. Several references to wearing animal furs (8183) suggest the killing of a species to supply the consumer culture with luxury items. And as the Professor reflects on his life, he acknowledges that the delight he had taken in his familys activities in the old house has been eradicated by the acquisitiveness of Rosamond, Louie, and his own wife, Lillian. Expressions describing this older daughter often suggest queenly aloofness. Seeming distant and uncaring, she sometimes wears a haughty expression and the curl of her lips was handsome, but terrifying (81). The Professor notices Rosamond wearing things with a kind of lurking purple and lavender in them, colors symbolic of royalty which he thinks splendid for her (81). As she descends the stairs leaving his attic study, the Professor notes the aroma of lavender and orris-root (64), the dried root of the beautiful and fragrant iris, a flower symbolic of power and majesty and the origin of the royal scepter (Grieve 434); and its swordlike, bluish-green leaves suggest the sharpness of a weapon that might be used to ward off any envious opponents. Cathers repetition of phrases suggests the intensity of feeling throughout the novel. It is mentioned that St. Peter worked so fiercely by night (29) as a young scholar, and later his wife Lillian became fiercely jealous (50) of the Professors student and friend Tom Outland. As a young woman she had very vehement likes and dislikes(50), and Kathleens husband Scott, whom the 48 Professor convinced to play the role of the Plantagenet Richard the Lionheart in a college tableau, stands with his brows fiercely frowning (74). Here, the reference to the House of Plantagenet is reminiscent of a family torn by bloody feuds, and obliquely hints at Richards father, King Henry II, whose paramour was Fair Rosamond. As Professor St. Peter notices about younger daughter Kathleen, she sets her chin so fiercely (88), and when Lillian questions her husband about keeping the old house, the Algernon Charles Swinburne, age twenty-three. Copy of a sketch by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 18591860. ends of the Professors formidable eyebrows ascended and he muttered fiercely that it was his only extravagance (96). Further showing the harshness that lurks below family relationships, the Professors son-in law Scott notes that Rosamond has run her father to death on the shopping trip to Chicago, and that the Marselluses have no mercy (151) with regard to using up his strength, and insisting on his time and advice to shop for their Spanish furniture. Like the legendary queen of the Lombards, Cathers Rosamond is characterized as revengeful (84). As a traditional symbol of envy, the color green appears throughout the novel. Kathleens hazel-colored hair has distinctly green glints in it (38) and there is even mention of her turning green Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 with envy (85). As a natural color, it also appears as the green salad at dinner and green plants in the sitting room downstairs, and it is the color of the door to the Professors garden. Louie presents his wife with emeralds, precious green-colored stones that he can now afford, and asserts that in his view her name spells emeralds (75). Finally, references to the horse and to protection in the novel also suggest connections to the Lombard queen. In the Professors garden is a spreading horse-chestnut tree, and he regrets not having visited Paris with Tom, where the yellow horse-chestnuts were bright and bitter after rain . . . (260). Conversing with the Professor, his old German landlord recalls that he had to work like a horse in his youth (53). These and other references are suggestive of the origin of queens name Rosamund meaning noted protector and horse protector, based on the Germanic hros, for horse or steed, and munt, protection. As such the name is reminiscent of the Germanic peoples deep reverence for horses, whose whinnying, ear movements, and stamping gestures were thought to prophesy outcomes of battles (Sullivan 5053). As a parent, the Professor recalls his own role as protector, and that it was Kathleen as a girl who needed his protection more than Rosamond, who leaned toward her mother. As motifs and references in Cathers novel suggest, two noblewomen who have been the subjects of European legends and literature may have served as prototypes for the character of the Professors older daughter: the beautiful paramour Fair Rosamond and the harsh, calculating Lombard queen. Although the beauty of Rosamond Marcellus is recognized widely, the Professor has his doubts, and also finds the traits of insensitivity and cruelty, which he regrets. In The Professors House Cather presents the bitter feelings underlying family relationships, but she also reminds the reader of historical figures, two women of similar name, who probably served as models for the Professors older daughter and much of the novels imagery, and whose celebrated stories form a connection between the Old World and the New. WORKS CITED Abbott, Jacob. Fair Rosamond. Richard I. New York: Harper, 1857. 5265. Alboin. The New Encyclopedia Britannica: Micropedia. 15th Edition. 1994. Alfieri, Vittorio. Rosamunda: A Tragedy in Five Acts. Trans. Thomas Williams. London: R. S. Francis, 1856. Cather, Willa. The Professors House. 1925. Willa Cather Scholarly www.WillaCather.org Edition. Ed. James Woodress, Kari A. Ronning, and Frederick M. Link. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002. .The Selected Letters of Willa Cather. Ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout. New York: Knopf, 2013. Grieve, Mrs. M. (Maud). Irises. A Modern Herbal. 1931. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1971. 434440. Harrell, David. From Mesa Verde to The Professors House. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1992. Harris, Richard C. Willa Cather and Henry Blake Fuller: More Building Blocks for The Professors House. Cather Studies 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures. Ed. Melissa J. Homestead and Guy J. Reynolds. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. 11432. Harrison, Antony H. Rosamond and Chastelard: Courtly Love and Swinburnes Religion of Beauty. Swinburnes  Medievalism: A Study in Victorian Love Poetry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988. 3753. Marzo, Eduardo, ed. Songs of Italy. Trans. Theo. Baker. New York: Schirmer, 1904. 45. Matthews, W. H. The Bower of Fair Rosamond. Mazes and Labyrinths. London: Longmans, 1922. 164169. Rodney, Robert Burton. Alboin and Rosamond and Lesser Poems. Philadelphia,1870. Rosamond, Wife of the Lombard King Alboin. Infoplease. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Columbia University Press. 2012. Web. Rosamond. The New Encyclopedia Britannica: Micropedia. 15th Edition. 1994. Rosamond, Wife of Albion (sic). Omnilexica. Web. Squire, Kelsey. Jazz Age Places: Modern Regionalism in Willa Cathers The Professors House. Cather Studies 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures. Ed. Melissa J. Homestead and Guy J. Reynolds. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2011. 4566. Sullivan, Peter M. St. Peters Bote: A German Language Newspaper on the Canadian Prairie. The Early Years. Saskatoon: Saskatchewan German Council, 2010. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards: A Tragedy. Transcribed by David Price from the 1899 Chatto & Windus edition. Project Gutenberg eBook. Web. Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987. 49 The Translation in the Closet: Willa Cather and Marguerite Yourcenar Stphanie Durrans | University of Bordeaux Montaigne Among the many gems to be found in Janis Stout and Andrew Jewells The Selected Letters of Willa Cather is Cathers 1938 letter to her publisher Alfred A. Knopf, which has brought to light a hitherto hidden connection between Cather and Marguerite Yourcenar, one of Frances most renowned writers and the first woman to become a member of the French Academy. The two women had recently met to discuss Yourcenars ongoing translation of Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Cather takes Yourcenar to task for failing to understand the aesthetics of her novel, as shown by Yourcenars desire to translate into French the many Spanish words that crop up in the narrative. Cather also deplores Yourcenars lack of acquaintance with the American Marguerite Yourcenar, Northeast Harbor, Maine, 1985. Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos. 50 Southwest which she herself regarded as the main protagonist of the novel, and she unfavorably compares Yourcenars translation with that of Alessandra Scalero for the Italian translation of Death Comes for the Archbishop. At the time, Yourcenar had already published quite a few novels, essays, and poems, and she was also very much involved in translating the works of other novelists, but she had not yet written the novels that would bring her national and international recognition in the 1950s. The clash between the two women was quite a predictable onea clash between two strong-willed, self-assured writers whose positions on questions of art and creation could be quite dogmatic at times. Mark Madigan has already focused on the story of this aborted translation and on the process that eventually led Christine Carel to take up the task of translating the novel for Editions Stock. His findings throw light upon what had so far been regarded by Yourcenar critics as a mere project, since no one had ever found any trace of the translation itself.1 A number of shadowy zones remain, however, and I imagine they will persist until more of Yourcenars correspondence with her partner Grace Frick is eventually unsealed in 2037 (Savigneau 129). How was Death Comes for the Archbishop brought to Yourcenars attention? Why did she choose to translate it in the first place? And what became of Yourcenars translation after the work had been taken up by Carel? None of these questions will be given a definite answer in the space of this essay, but a closer look at the lives and works of the two writers suggests that a deeper current of affinities might have run between them after all. I will focus first on Yourcenars whereabouts between 1937 and 1949, those twelve years that correspond to a marked decrease in inspiration and creativity in her life. Then I will examine the long, painstaking process that would eventually lead her to publish her bestselling and most outstanding contribution to French letters, Memoirs of Hadrian (1951). My belief is that Yourcenars hidden connection with Cather acted as a catalyst in channeling her own creative energies in the late 1940s, once she had gained enough maturity to draw on the best of the bitter experience of her failed translation. Cathers almost numinous influence consequently illuminates both the genesis of Memoirs of Hadrian and its contribution to the new directions generally taken by the historical novel at the time. Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 Shadowy Zones: 1937 and 1949 Ironically enough, the first woman to enter the French Academy was not born in France but in Belgium and then left France to settle in the United States, where she later applied for American citizenship. Quite a few observers have underlined that Marguerite de Crayencour, or Madame, as she was later called even by her friends, was acutely aware of her aristocratic origins. Yourcenars new acquaintances were at once struck by her haughty demeanor and aristocratic bearing,2 but some of them also noted the twinkle in the eye that revealed her sharp intellect and caustic sense of humor. Even after spending many years in the U.S., she remained aloof, while her companion, Grace Frick, more freely interacted and socialized with their neighbors. Frick, a young American from Kansas, had fallen for Yourcenar right after their first chance meeting in a Parisian caf in 1937. She soon invited Yourcenar to follow her to the U.S., and the two young women consequently set off for America in September 1937. While Yourcenar had been working on the translation of Death Comes for the Archbishop since 1935 (Madigan),3 little is known about her activities during these few months in the U.S. Yourcenars biographer Josyane Savigneau points out that she would never talk about that first winter in the U.S. (129). In light of Cathers revelation to Knopf, one may wonder if what Savigneau puts down to Yourcenars desire to protect her private life might have been partly motivated by the spite she felt at having her translation turned down by Cather. One thing is sure: during that period, as if still under the spell of Cathers Archbishop, she was also meditating at length upon her own relationship to Catholicism and religious feelings, as indicated in her regular correspondence with Catholic essay writer Charles Du Bos. In one of her letters to him (dated December 1937), she evokes the disorder characterizing the times and leading her to view the Catholic tradition as a most valuable part of our complex inheritance, praising Christianity as the admirable sum of twenty centuries of experience, and one of mans most beautiful dreams (letter to Charles Du Bos, dated 2123 December 1937, Harvard, quoted by Savigneau 131, my translation). And yet later, when asked about the state of her mind at this time in her life, she claimed that she had never been more estranged from Christian thought and religious concerns in general (Savigneau 131132)a statement which these letters to Du Bos, published in the mid 1960s, would come to blatantly contradict. Yourcenars probable desire to throw a veil of secrecy over her meeting with Cather is also suggested in the contradictory statements she and Frick would later make when it came to dating her translation work. Frick once insisted that Yourcenar had worked on the translation of What Maisie Knew in 1937 and 1938 (though the book would not be published before 1947), www.WillaCather.org while Yourcenar herself maintained that she was, at that time, working on a translation of Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (Savigneau 142). Both statements are now suspect considering Cathers letter to Knopf, as Yourcenars translation of Death Comes for the Archbishop was obviously still in progress when the two writers met in 1938. What Yourcenar did in the U.S. in the course of these few months is either open to suspicion or simply goes unrecorded in her correspondence and biographies, as if a veil of silence had been deliberately thrown over that period in her life. Yourcenar sailed back to France in April 1938 and spent the next year or so travelling across Europe. The war broke out just as she was preparing to sail back to New York to spend another winter with Frick in the U.S. This was in September 1939. Little did she know then that her departure marked the beginning of a twelve-year exile. The two women would then try to make a living from teaching and conferences, and strange twists of fate would lead Yourcenar to cross Cathers path in more ways than one. Of all places in the U.S., Mount Desert Island happens to be the summer retreat both writers chose in the 1940s. While Cather spent the last four summers of her life there (between 1943 and 1947), Yourcenar and Frick discovered the place in 1942 and eventually decided to buy a house there in 1950, a house Yourcenar would frequent until her death in 1987. Whether they ever met on the island is open to conjecture but Yourcenar and Frick definitely spent the summers of 1943 and 1944 in Somesville, only a few miles north of Northeast Harbor, where Cather and Lewis had settled. The unexpected arrival of a long-lost trunk from Europe in January 1949 would then clinch the parallel in the personal and professional trajectories of the two writers. A Process of Slow Infusion: The Genesis of Memoirs of Hadrian Despite occasional and short-lived spurts of creative energy, the 1940s were marked by a growing lassitude and despondency, Yourcenar having lost all literary ambition and settling into the rut of domesticity.4 Some extraordinary twist of fate was going to revive these ambitions, however, and allow her to win both national and international acclaim. This twist of fate took the shape of a trunk that Yourcenar had left in a hotel in Switzerland before the war and that was eventually sent to her in December of 1948a trunk that contained old letters, family papers and also fragments of her work from the 1930s. Most of these were unfortunately thrown into the fire, if we are to believe Yourcenars account, so that one will never know if the trunk also contained some of the sheets from her aborted translation and perhaps even some of Cathers letters. The only 51 remnant from the past essays Not Under Forty that Yourcenar freely (published in 1936), her talks about is a bundle of words undoubtedly echo yellowing sheets starting Cathers credo when she with the inscription states: There are books My dear Mark . . . which one should not Mark. . . . What friend attempt before having or love, what distant passed the age of forty. relative was this? I could Earlier than that one not recall the name at all. may well fail to recognize It was several minutes those great natural before I remembered boundaries which from that Mark stood here person to person, and for Marcus Aurelius, from century to century, and that I had in hand separate the infinite What was there in Death Comes for the Archbishop that made it so inseparable from Yourcenars a fragment of the lost variety of mankind; or, lifelong fascination with Hadrian? manuscript. From that on the contrary, one may moment there was no question but that this book must be attach too much importance to mere administrative barriers, to taken up again, whatever the cost (Memoirs 273274). This the customs houses or the sentry boxes erected between man and book was Memoirs of Hadrian, a vast project that she had man. It took me years to learn how to calculate exactly the distances first contemplated writing after her visit to the Villa Adriana between the emperor and myself (Yourcenar, Memoirs 270271). during one of her stays in Rome, in 1924. Yourcenars 1937 trip consequently marked the beginning Her first attempts in this direction had come up against various difficulties, among which choosing the right perspective from which to tell Hadrians story. All the early versions of the manuscript were deservedly destroyed, as Yourcenar puts it in her explanatory notes to the novel (269). She then gave no more thought to the project, at least until 1934 when she started researching her subject more thoroughly and wrote some fifteen pages which seemed to [her] final in form but which were similarly put aside. From the version of 1934 only one sentence has been retained: I begin to discern the profile of my death (Yourcenar, Memoirs 269), a sentence that strangely echoes the Archbishops own concerns as he is nearing death and taking stock of his life and achievements. Interestingly enough, Yourcenar does mention in her explanatory notes her 1937 trip to the U.S., in the course of which she did some reading for this book in the libraries at Yale (270). Some of the fragments she wrote then were included in the final version of Memoirs of Hadrian. The genesis of Hadrian thus confirms beyond any doubt that the project had been slowly maturing in Yourcenars mind alongside her own translation of Death Comes for the Archbishop, at least from 1937 onward. Once more, however, the manuscript was not taken any further despite what seemed like a promising start, and the only reason given by Yourcenar to account for this latency period is that she was too young to take up such a subject. Whether or not she was acquainted with Cathers famous collection of 52 of a long period of time when discouragement and even despair got the better of her. Retrieving her old papers eleven years later was the trigger that energized Yourcenar into a productive phase of creative frenzy. Hadrians specter had come back to haunt her, but this time Yourcenar was determined to exorcise her double and give it literary shape and existence. Her next step was most unexpected from someone who had suddenly found the renewed energy to finish a long-standing project. No sooner had she made the decision to get back to work than she started packing her suitcases and set off on a trip to New Mexico! Cathers letter to Knopf now throws quite an ironic light upon such a decision, since one of her two major bones of contention, and possibly the root of her discord with Yourcenar, is that the young woman had never even set foot in the Southwest, knew very little about it, and consequently intended to paraphrase Cathers descriptions of the landscape (Selected Letters 548). Once more, Hadrian and Latour appear to be closely connected, despite the temporal and geographical distance separating them. Once Yourcenar had reached her destination she could at last familiarize herself with the landscapes that had been so much a part of Latours adventures. This was very much like a rebirth for Yourcenar, as noted by Frick in her diary; she had not seen her companion so happy for years (Savigneau 191). This was the book of a lifetime, a book that had been lying dormant inside her for almost thirty years, whose progress had been marked by many fits and starts, Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 but also (as Yourcenar probably intuited herself ) the book that would bring her lasting fame in the literary world. Revisiting the Historical Novel had proved powerless in the face of so many wartime atrocities (7). Inversely, Memoirs of Hadrian (and later The Abyss) affirm Yourcenars belief in the redemptive virtues of humanism in the face of chaos, and though she might appear to have taken refuge in the faraway past (the second century CE with Hadrian, the sixteenth century with Znon in The Abyss), this is merely a strategy to approach her own times from a renewed, enlightened perspective. Like Cather before her, she revised the outdated form of the historical novel to address from a different angle a number of concerns that were actually quite topical. What was there in Death Comes for the Archbishop that made it so inseparable from Yourcenars lifelong fascination with Hadrian? In fashioning what was going to become their respective masterpieces, both Cather and Yourcenar were attempting to capture a moment of transition in the history of mankind, a time of chaos when old assumptions were crumbling away and when the shape of things to come was still undefinable. One can easily understand why the story of a French priest stranded in desert landscapes and confronted with the ancient beliefs of the local populations had such an appeal for Yourcenar. Both protagonists belong to a time of transition between pagan times and Christianity, and both will struggle to impose some form of order on the primeval chaos they face: Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. A great part of my life was going to be spent in trying to define, and then to portray, that man existing alone, and yet closely bound with all being, states Yourcenar in her Yourcenar as a young woman, as shown on the cover of Josyane Savigneaus Reflections (Memoirs 269).5 1990 biography, Marguerite Yourcenar: Linvention dune vie. Yourcenars work was somehow out of sync with the main literary currents of the time and Memoirs of Hadrian naturally resisted being forced into a neat category. Critics have diversely referred to it as fictional memoirs, apocryphal memoirs, a biography or even a lyrical biography (Julien 96). Yourcenar herself is said to have used the word narrative (rcit),6 the same word Cather used to refer to Death Comes for the Archbishop in her famous 1927 letter to the Commonweal. As noted by Anne-Yvonne Julien, the nouveau roman was then bursting onto the literary landscape, with emphasis on experimental practices and narrative destructuring and negating forms of humanism that www.WillaCather.org Yourcenar also had to resolve fundamental questions of point of view, and Death Comes for the Archbishop might well have played a role in helping her handle some tricky issues. Her very first attempts to approach the emperors life had been done in the form of dialogue and from the point of view of Antinous, the Greek youth who soon became Hadrians favorite. Dissatisfied with such experiments, Yourcenar destroyed these early drafts and in 1934 settled for a new narrative strategy, very likely around the time she discovered Death Comes for the Archbishop, which she apparently started translating in 1935. At this time she wrote that famous sentence: I begin to discern the profile of my deatha powerful sentence that she would retain sixteen years later in her final composition and that definitely sets the tone for the work in progress. 1934 was also the year she published a collection of three stories whose title (La Mort conduit lattelage) strangely echoes Cathers novel.7 Positing death as the initial standpoint from which a whole life will be assessed resulted in giving more weight and significance to each and every detail of this life. In both works also, Rome is used as a starting-point from which to encompass a wide panorama of experience: Latours exploration of the vast desert landscapes of the American Southwest and Hadrians travels to the far reaches of the Roman empire. 53 Julien underlines that, in Yourcenars eyes, Hadrian embodied a form of political intelligence in the Greek sense of the term; this political intelligence showed, she says, in his concern for innovation and reform, his desire to save a fragile economy, to improve the status of the slaves and their protection by the law, to stabilize the Roman empire, to put into practice the ideas of Greek philosophers and to respect the contribution of Greek art and culture (157). The same concerns characterize Latour. That Hadrian was connected with the world of the Archbishop in Yourcenars mind is suggested by her observation that the young Mexican boys she saw in Santa Fe were not so different, after all, from the little boy Hadrian used to be (Goslar, Yourcenar 172). The personalities of the French archbishop and the Roman emperor bear more similarities than one might recognize at first sight. Both are cultivated, refined, immersed in classical culture, and also characterized by a curious blend of asceticism and hedonism. The course of Hadrians meditation roughly follows the episodes of Latours adventures in the Southwest: reflections on food, on the various forms of freedom, on ambition, on family bonds, on the value of friendship, on slavery, mankind, womens condition, the fragility of human civilizations, and the inevitability of death ( Julien 177). The haunting appeal of unknown lands and barbarous climes (Yourcenar, Memoirs 282283) exerts itself on both men, and Hadrians ambivalent attraction to certain primitive sacrificial rites of initiation echoes Latours unsettling experience in the ceremonial cave in the Pecos, where he listens to one of the oldest voices of the earth (137), the rumblings of some powerful subterranean river. In both cases, be it in the Orient or in the American Southwest, the mysteries of unknown territory stand out as a locus of otherness, where man loses his stability and experiences a profound feeling of alienation ( Julien 168). Critics have shown how prominent the theme of the frontier was in Memoirs of Hadrian, both as a geographical and ontological location (the extreme edges of the Roman Empire, the border zone between Hadrians civilized self and the barbarian, more primitive side of his own unconscious).8 Lastly, Hadrians passion for the poetry and legend of an earlier day (Yourcenar, Memoirs 282) is also one that Latour would have found most congenial if we consider his own attempts to preserve the old legends and customs and superstitions [that] were already dying out (289). As if she had at last learned from Cathers attempts to make her aware of the fundamental role of the landscape, Yourcenar presents Hadrian as a man whose mindscape changes under the influence of the landscape in the course of his journeys across the Empire. His and Latours visions seem to fuse when Hadrian evokes the landscape of [his] days [that] appears to be composed, 54 like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pellmell (Memoirs 32). Yourcenar was also well aware that Hadrian was first and foremost an architect, and it is no coincidence that her attempt to reconstruct his past should run parallel with an evocation of all the cities, buildings, and memorials that now crystallize the memory of the emperor. Yourcenar saw in the edifice a self-sufficient entity, both a drama in itself and the setting for this drama, the place of a dialogue between the will of man that was still inscribed in this giant masonry work, lifeless mineral energy, and irrevocable Time.9 She must therefore have been struck by Latours similar wish to build a cathedral that would be very much like an extension of himself and of his dreams, a cathedral that seemed to start directly out of those rose-coloured hillswith a purpose so strong that it was like action (283284), quite a fitting climax in the life of a man for whom action had always taken precedence over pure reflection and contemplation.10 Conclusion My aim has not been to reduce the extraordinary complexity and erudition of Memoirs of Hadrian to the influence of a single book. Many critics have delved into the hundreds of books Yourcenar immersed herself in to write the story of the emperor, and they have shown to what extent this masterpiece was the product of what is known as innutrition, i.e., a long process of familiarization, assimilation and eventual appropriation of the sources in which a writer finds creative inspiration. I do believe, however, that Death Comes for the Archbishop is one of those great classics on which Yourcenars world-famous work drew, and that it even acted as a catalyst in her decision to take up the unfinished work she had been struggling with for nearly thirty years. Poring over the long list of books (6,876 in total)11 to be found in Yourcenars private library will bring no result. Cather is conspicuously absent from her bookshelves, though such writers as Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and many other American or English writers can be found there. If we consider, along with Yourcenar, that one of the best ways to reconstruct a mans thinking is to rebuild his library (Memoirs 273), then Death Comes for the Archbishop must recover the place that it has long been denied in Yourcenars intellectual formation. NOTES 1. See Mireille Brmonds recent article Marguerite Yourcenar, infatigable traductrice (2013). Brmond quotes such sources as Brengre Deprezs Marguerite Yourcenar and the USA (2009) and Lucile Desblachess Marguerite Yourcenar: De la Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 traduction la cration (1995), neither of which convinces her to think that Yourcenars translation of Death Comes for the Archbishop had gone beyond the state of a mere project. In her biography of Yourcenar, Michle Goslar includes a passing reference to the translation of Death Comes for the Archbishop in the list of works that Yourcenar left unfinished or simply destroyed (371). Cather is not even mentioned in the voluminous index. 2. See Florence Codmans testimony in Savigneaus biography (126127). After emphasizing that anyone would have found it difficult to resist her charm and authority, Codman remembers that Yourcenar was also very stubborn and had very fixed opinions on literature (127). 3. Cathers novel might have been introduced to Yourcenar through one of the expatriate writers she frequently met in Paris, among them Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner and Natalie Barney (see Georgia Hooks Shurrs Marguerite Yourcenar et le drame noir amricain, 29). 4. This long period of inactivity has puzzled quite a few scholars. Some, like Goslar, have wondered about possible links with Yourcenars geographical exile. Goslar even sees in these ten years of near silence (only three short plays in the space of ten years, compared with the fifty or so publications that preceded her departure for the U.S.) the reflection of Yourcenars desperate fight against the temptation of absolute emptiness (LExil et le silence, 178). 5. The first sentence is actually one of Yourcenars favorite statements by Flaubert, whose works and correspondence were a rich mine of inspiration for both Cather and Yourcenar. 6. She also occasionally referred to it as a meditation bordering on history and imaginary memoirs (Julien 96). 7. Unaware of the Cather connection, critics usually trace a line of filiation between Yourcenar and Dickinson whose famous lines Because I could not stop for Death / he kindly stopped for me; / The carriage held but just ourselves / And Immortality also resonate in the title of the collection. 8. See Levillains illuminating analysis of the theme (6074). 9. . . . ldifice se suffit: il est la fois le drame et le dcor du drame, le lieu dun dialogue entre la volont humaine encore inscrite dans ces maonneries normes, linerte nergie minrale, et lirrvocable Temps (Le Cerveau noir de Piranse, 136). My translation. 10. This is indeed something else Latour and Hadrian have in common and which inspired profound respect in both Cather and Yourcenar. Yourcenar once said that the only other historical figure she had ever been tempted to write about was Omar Khayym, but that the latter was too much of a pure contemplator and www.WillaCather.org of a somber skeptic, she said before adding the world of action meant little to him (274). 11. See Yvon Berniers inventory of Yourcenars and Fricks books in Petite Plaisance, their home on Mount Desert Island. WORKS CITED Bernier, Yvon. Inventaire de la bibliothque de Marguerite Yourcenar. Petite Plaisance. Clermont-Ferrand: SIEY, 2004. Brmond, Mireille. Marguerite Yourcenar, infatigable traductrice. Des Femmes Traductrices: Entre altrit et affirmation de soi. Ed. Andre Lerousseau. Paris: LHarmattan, 2013. 5976. Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. 1927. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. John J. Murphy, Charles Mignon, Frederick Link, and Kari A. Ronning. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P, 1999. . The Selected Letters of Willa Cather. Ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout. New York: Knopf, 2013. Deprez, Brengre. Marguerite Yourcenar and the USA: From Prophecy to Protest. Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2009. Desblaches, Lucile. Marguerite Yourcenar: De la traduction la cration. Bulletin SIEY 15 (1995): 23. Goslar, Michle. LExil et le silence. Marguerite Yourcenar: Ecritures de lexil. Ed. Ana de Medeiros and Brengre Deprez. Academia Bruylant, 1998, 171180. . Yourcenar. Biographie. Quil et t fade dtre heureux. Bruxelles: Editions Racine, 1998. Hooks Shurr, Georgia. Marguerite Yourcenar et le drame noir amricain. Marguerite Yourcenar et lAmrique. Dir. Michle Goslar. Bruxelles: Cidmy, Bulletin annuel n 10, 1998. 2757. Julien, Anne-Yvonne. Marguerite Yourcenar ou la signature de larbre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002. Levillain, Henriette. Mmoires dHadrien de Marguerite Yourcenar. Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Madigan, Mark J. Translating the Southwest: The 1940 French Edition of Willa Cathers Death Comes for the Archbishop. Forthcoming Cather Studies 11: Willa Cather at the Modernist Crux. Ed. Ann Moseley, John J. Murphy, and Robert Thacker. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2016. Savigneau, Josyane. Marguerite Yourcenar: Linvention dune vie. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Yourcenar, Marguerite. Le Cerveau noir de Piranse. Paris: Gallimard, 1989 [1979]. . Memoirs of Hadrian and Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian. 1951. Trans. Grace Frick. Intro. Paul Bailey. London: Penguin, 1986. 55 The Haunting Continent: Europe in Cather John J. Murphy A review of Willa Cathers major canon, in which I include the Avignon fragments as the final entry, reveals Europes presence as most predominant in her first and final novels. The first, Alexanders Bridge (1912), which she disparaged unfairly in one of her expository fictions, My First Novels [There Were Two] (1931), is an important novel not only as a lead-in to The Professors House (1925) but to the strategy of setting distinguishing subsequent work. Place becomes a state of mind, as when Bartley Alexander and Hilda Burgoyne enjoy a golden day in London. I think people were meant to be happy, a little, she says, and the narrator comments, On such rare afternoons the ugliest of cities becomes the most beautiful, the most prosaic becomes the most poetic, and months of sodden days are offset by a moment of miracle (8485). Of course, I will overlook, intentionally or not, evidence readers might add to this survey of Europe as a state of mind or, perhaps, an obsession of Cathers. Early Novels Seven of the eleven chapters of Alexanders Bridge are set in London, and in one of these (IV), the Paris of the couples first infatuation is recalled intensely enough for Bartley to exclaim, I was back there (54). The sense of place in these scenes and their tangible and thematic contrast to those set in America are integral to the issue of Europe in Cather, a comparable and even weightier issue than that of the Southwest. Both locales are symbolized by windows. His existence . . . becoming a network of great and little details (37) and feeling dead inside, Bartley reveals in his letter to Hilda that their London affair has been as if a window beside me had suddenly opened, and as if all the smells of spring blew in to me (92). Cather thus echoes herself in describing the structure of The Professors House, the first part rather overcrowded and stuffy, stifling for her professor. Then I wanted to open the square window and let in the fresh air that blew off the Blue Mesa . . . (On Writing 3132). In the early novel, thin sunlight on naked trees and dark, stormy winter storms in Boston frame a London of theatre and of Hildas dining room hung round with French prints below shelves of blue china. The dinner there, as Ann Romines notes (83), provides essential nourishment . . . missing in the Boston scenes and is the occasion of Bartley and Hildas Paris reminiscence, full of picturesque detail. Characteristically foggy and dull, Cathers London provides the setting for this jewellike Parisian set piece, like the turquoise set in dull silver, as the epigraph of The Professors House has it, that is Tom Outlands Story. Bursts of brightness in London include the golden day of 56 Bartleys last scene there and, earlier, his contemplation of the trails of smoke behind the Houses of Parliament catch[ing] fire in the sunset (34), a painterly scene recalling Claude Monets 19001901 impressionistic studies of the Houses of Parliament (including Sunset, Stormy Sky, and Effect of Sunlight in the Fog) as well as the flame-colored sunsets in Toms story. While Cather claimed that in her second first novel, O Pioneers! (1913), she replaced a European setting she knew very casually with the familiar Nebraska she knew very well and really did care about (On Writing 92), this other first novel is rife with ambiguity about what she termed her home pasture (Bennett 200201). True, Cathers Nebraska is uninterrupted by London scenes, but, rather, filtered through rural French ones. Her oft-quoted landscape descriptions of green and brown and yellow fields, of windmills and men and horses at harvesting, of plains that rise a little to meet the sun like the plains of Lombardy (O Pioneers! 7374) resemble late nineteenth-century French landscapes, like Vincent van Goghs Enclosed Field with Ploughman (1889). Her landscapes are reworkings as well of the descriptions she wrote during her 1902 visit to Barbizon and the high, windy, dusty country around Arles (Willa Cather in Europe 169), where van Gogh spent his last years. In O Pioneers! the French church of Sainte-Agnes high on a hill with miles of warm color lying at its feet . . . reminded one of the churches built long ago in the wheatlands of middle France (189). Yet in spite of all this borrowing as well as the mining of European classics like Keatss The Eve of St. Agnes and Canto 5 of Dantes Inferno (Murphy, Comprehensive 124) for her tragic love story, this Cather novel hardly visits Europe in what might be designated as scenes. However, the Old World always haunts: Mrs. Bergson struggles to duplicate her life in Sweden; Alexandra, a sunlit Swedish maiden with milk pails, reads Frithiof s Saga; Swedish songs are mentioned; there are comparisons of Swedish, Bohemian; and French cultures. Maries father recalls Frank Shabatas mother fertilizing cabbage on her Elbe valley farm, and old Mrs. Lee, her girlhood on a dairy farm in Gottland. Alexandra tells Emil the history of their ship-building grandfathers disgrace in Stockholm and of their fathers letterwriting to the country to which she hopes he returned in death, yet she never expresses a desire to visit. At the end, she anticipates an ocean voyage with Carl, noting that she hadnt been on the water since the voyage from Sweden when she was a little girl and would dream of the shipyard full of masts where her father worked. But the anticipated voyage is toward the future, to Alaska. O Pioneers! concludes with an impressionistic splash of yellow wheatfields. Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 Cathers two subsequent novels, The Song of the Lark (1915) and My ntonia (1918), resemble O Pioneers! in being haunted by rather than visiting European countries Cather herself never visited. Perhaps the best approach to the earlier novel is through its final chapter, in which Thea Kronborg comes into full possession of things she had been refining and perfecting for so long (525). The components of this possession include her Scandinavian ethnicity enhanced by Germanic and eastern European culture. While neither Kronborg parent is an immigrant, and although Thea herself is very sensitive about being thought a foreigner (16), she remains, as Dr. Archie reflects at the outset, a little Swede, through and through (10), without the American superficialities that Mrs. Kronborg detects in her older daughter, Anna, and Herr Wunsch characterizes in young American ladies as a grinning face and hollow in the insides (87). Theas talent and unconventional qualities are supported by Ray Kennedys insurance, Dr. Archies loan, and Fred Ottenburgs somewhat dubious Arizona vacation, but directed toward a profession by European immigrants. The Kohlers create the German setting for Wunschs introduction of Glucks Orfeo ed Euridice and insistence on the necessity of only one big thing desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little (84).Thea is shaken by Wunschs outbursts and shares with him the secret of her artistic self (8788). Hungarian-born pianist Andor Harsanyi also unsettles her, counsels her on every artists responsibility: Every artist makes himself born (196). Harsanyi discovers her voice, steers her toward her operatic career, and gives her a ticket to the Chicago Symphony, where she hears her first Wagner and Dvoks Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, From the New World. Czech music by a Czech composer who recognized affinities between African-American spirituals and Czech songs and dances (Stefan 20304) becomes the vehicle of Theas empathy with her homeland: the sand hills . . . the reaching and reaching of high plains, the immeasurable yearning of all flat lands, and first memories (221). Previously, the flat country, wet fields, and morning light in French painter Jules Bretons The Song of the Lark occasioned a similar revelation and, according to Cather, taught Nebraskans and other prairie dwellers to hear the lark song for themselves (The World and the Parish 843). Theas full possession experience is as a Wagnerian heroine, and excerpts of his German libretti pepper this text, but the Germany of her cultivation and debut is absent. For German lands, readers have only Herr Wunschs reverie of the old country: Pictures came and went. . . . Faces, mountains, rivers, autumn days in other vineyards far away. He thought of a Fuszreise [hike] he had made through the Hardt Mountains in his student days; of the innkeepers pretty daughter who had lighted his pipe for him in the garden one summer evening, of the woods above Wiesbaden, haymakers on an island in the river (105). www.WillaCather.org Middle Novels Reveries and memories of Bohemia, another place Cather never visited, appear in My ntonia, although as the first-person account of Jim Burden, this novels Europe is primarily a creation of Jims reading, embellishing both his Bohemian immigrant friend ntonia Shimerda and the ethnic communities of his Nebraska boyhood. In the novels third book Cather hints that Virgils classical pastoral Georgics determines the form and content of Jims memoir. He views the pastoral as the poets attempt to bring the Muses from Greece to the Italian countryside of his childhood, an accomplishment in which the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow (256). Jims musings take place in his college study in Lincoln with its large map of ancient Rome, photograph of the Tragic Theater at Pompeii, and west-facing window open to the prairie. Rome, Pompeii, and much of the Italian countryside Cather knew firsthand from her 1908 trip to Italy, about which she wrote enthusiastically to her siblings and friends (Selected Letters 10815). She complains in a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett that weve been reared upon a coarse and stupid conception of Italy, and thanks Jewett for her gift of Alice Maynells essays, including The Lesson of Landscape, the only truthful writing I have ever read about Italyin English. . . . How beautiful and truthful she is about all this pale-colored lovely earth . . . (112). Not only does Cathers novel share Virgils themes of hard work, seasonal challenges, family togetherness, and fruitful agriculture, but set pieces like the snake-killing, the wolves story, the summer storm, the plow at sunset have counterparts in Georgics, and their patterns of arrangement are similar. The pictorial imagery of Virgils poem, like the novels, includes descriptive detail in the vein of genre and landscape painting, the total effect of which, notes translator L. P. Wilkinson, is a panorama of rural life, a supremely artistic documentary (see Murphy, My ntonia: The Road Home 45). Jims Nebraska, however, if inspired by and filtered through Virgils Italy, is created out of firsthand experiences, although with many European tags: Jim pastes a print of Napoleon Announcing the Divorce to Josephine in his picture-book for ntonias little sister, hired man Otto Fuchs contributes crche figures from Austria to decorate the Burdens Christmas tree, Norwegian neighbor Mrs. Harling plays the old operas . . . Martha, Norma, Rigoletto,telling [the children] the story while she played (170), in Lincoln Jim attends Dumass Camille with incidental music from La Traviata. 57 But the major foil to Jims new world material out of which countries are made (7) are Old World reminiscences of the Bohemians. Ashamed of her familys poverty and the avaricious behavior of her mother, ntonia repeatedly assures Jim of the privileged status of her father. Before the picnic scene, the fragrance of elder blossoms brings tears to her eyes. Elderbushes grew in their yard in the old country, where her papa would sit with his friends and she would overhear their beautiful talk. . . . About music, and the woods, and about God, and when they were young (228). Similar memories are prompted by the chirping insectthe story of Old Hata, who sang old songs to the children in a cracked voice, like this (38); by Mrs. Shimerdas gift of dried mushroomsJims image of some deep Bohemian forest (77); and by Mr.Shimerdas suicide, which generates Anton Jelineks story of helping a priest bring the Sacrament to soldiers during a cholera epidemic. For me, the most moving Old World reverie is Anton Cuzaks, who shares with Jim his early acquaintance with opera star Maria Vasak (Cathers fictitious name for Emmy Destinn, a champion of Czech nationalism). As a city man who liked theaters and lighted streets and music, Cuzak finds life on the prairie difficult: Sometimes I git awful sore on this place and want to quit. . . . He is anxious to hear of Jims visits to his old haunts in Prague and Vienna. Gee! I like to go back there once, he confides to Jim. Sometimes when I read the papers from the old country, I pretty near run away . . . (35455). In One of Ours (1922), Cather returns for the first time since Alexanders Bridge to a Europe she knew firsthand, if somewhat casually, for a setting. The companion novel, however, is The Song of the Lark, for in each a sensitive youth smothered by prairie life seeks and achieves escape to a larger world associated with Old World culture. Like Thea, Claude Wheeler is somewhat rescued by European friendships. He is introduced to an atmosphere of mental liberty (23) by his Bohemian friend Ernest Havel, who denounces American braggadocio and naivet and inability to find satisfaction within the mind and daily routines of life. Although brought to America for its advantages, he cherishes memories (albeit of hardship) of the old country, which Cather fashions into one of her poetic sketches of places she knows only secondhand: He saw a half-circle of green hills, with snow still lingering in the clefts of the higher ridges. . . . In the meadows at the foot . . . was a little boy [himself ], playing by the creek and watching his father and mother plough with two great oxen. . . . His mother walked barefoot. . . . His father always looked down. His mothers face was almost as brown and furrowed as the fields. . . . [H]e used to wonder why his parents looked so old. (18889) At college in Lincoln, Claude is befriended by the GermanAmerican family of a classmate and introduced to a world of 58 conversation, books, and music. Although poor, the Erlichs knew how to live . . . and spent their money on themselves, instead of on machines (66). While with the mother of this family of boys, as she bakes German Christmas cakes and sings sentimental German songs, Claude felt happy and full of kindness, and thought about beechwoods and walled towns, or about [German-born revolutionary] Carl Schurz and the Romantic revolution (69). These influences as well as his university course on European history and thesis on Joan of Arc contribute to his ideal of the war. She provides him with a French counterpart to the image cluster associated with Mrs. Erlich: Joan becomes a figure within a luminous cloud, like dust, with soldiers in it . . . the banner with lilies . . . a great church . . . cities with walls (93). The war in Europe challenges prairie complacency, highlighting peoples naivet and materialism. Claudes fathers initial concern is its impact on the price of wheat. His mother hunts the attic for a map of Europe, for which Nebraska farmers had never had much need (219), and sits in the red grass by her mailbox to read the war news, concerned about the fate of Paris, to her the wickedest of cities, the capital of a frivolous, winedrinking, Catholic people (232), yet among which there must be many God-fearing people (229). And Claude is forced to rethink his romantic views of Germans as a people pre-eminent in the virtues Americans most admire, who sing all those beautiful songs about women and children (224, 229). To these quiet wheatgrowing people, the war becomes a menace not to their safety or their goods, but to their comfortable, established way of thinking (225). Difficulty develops with proud German neighbors, and some, like Mrs. Voigt, who runs a railroad restaurant, are terrorized without cause. Young farmers like Claude and his neighbor Leonard Dawson, primed by journalistic propaganda, volunteer for Belgium, the Lusitania, Edith Cavell (31617), but really, in essence, to pursue what Ernest Havel criticizes as that something outside yourselves to warm you up (79). Claudes arrival in Normandy with the AEF provides Cather with an opportunity to draw on her own 1902 introduction to France. Steven B. Shively has noted distinctions between Claudes response to France and Cathers, indicating that, while Claudes France includes the seeds of Cathers own, she removed the energy, the joy, and most of the color of her 1902 travel articles to focus on great opposing forces (3031). George N. Kates illustrates Cathers borrowings here from her Dieppe, Rouen, and Barbizon articles, especially the description of the inn at Barbizon, where she enjoyed meals under a great horse chestnut tree: To be sure, the spreading tree in the [novel, at the Jouberts] . . . will become a cherry; but its genesis, even to a threatening summer shower from which it offers shelter is probably here, halfway across France (Willa Cather in Europe 116). Added to these early experiences are those of Cathers two-week journey Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 in 1920 to the war-torn area of France to retrace the odyssey of her doughboy cousin G. P. Cather (Claudes prototype) and visit his grave. The details of her trip to Cantigny and the cemetery at Villiers Tournelle are outlined in a July 7, 1920 letter to her father indicating that the region is still devastated (Selected Letters 295). Certainly there is evidence in this final book of an actuality more convincing than the poetic reveries of Bohemia, Germany, and Scandinavia. Strategic in this book are scenes set within or around churches the doughboys explore during their first days in France. Claude watches as the wounded, psychopathic American and his country girl seek shelter beneath the broken statue of a bishop extending his blessing in the doorway of the battered faade of Dieppes church of St. Jacques. In the destroyed village where Claude visits Mlle. De Courcy, a little girl leads him into the ruins of a church, where the blue sky was shining through the white arches and the Virgin stood with empty arms over the central door; a little foot sticking to her robe . . . where the infant Jesus had been shot away (503). In Beaufort, Claude hears of the tragic affair and suicides of the curs niece and a Bavarian soldier, and meets the ravaged cur, holding his hands against his breast to keep them from shaking, and look[ing] very old . . . broken, hopeless, as if he were sick of this world and done with it (573). Yet through all of this there is a strain of hope. In the cloister garden at the Red Cross barrack, after Olive de Courcy takes a woman carrying her baby into the shelter, Claude sat alone . . . tasting a new kind of happiness, a new kind of sadness. Ruin and new birth; the shudder of ugly things in the past, the trembling image of beautiful ones on the horizon; finding and losing; that was life, he saw (515). In the abbey church of St. Ouen, still as the stone figures in the chapels and amid the sound of the great bell, while trying to fathom Gothic architecture, Claude stares up at the rose window and experiences his epiphany: The purple and crimson and peacock-green of this window had been shining [for hundreds of years] before it got to him. . . . He felt distinctly that it went through him and farther still . . . (450 52). Kates regards Cathers 1902 piece on Rouen the genesis of this scene. This is her great tribute, he writes, to what is finest in the Old World, and has endured. . . . We could ask no better example of her sensitiveness, her scale of values (9293). For me, the scene is the crux of Cathers career and as such should be clustered with The Novel Dmeubl (1922) and Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle (1923). Cathers subsequent novel, A Lost Lady (1923), is in conjunction with these two essays: it is a lean, un-Dreiserian attunement of the estranged, romantic youth in a suffocating and dying society theme. The major European ingredient is the social framework: the provincial American industrialist playing the knight who enshrines his lady in his moat-bordered castlein this case an ugly enough (11) frame house hidden beneath vines and shrubbery, just as www.WillaCather.org its occupants are common enough stripped of their pretensions. The town of Sweet Water is the lords domain in a prairie country where the social strata is divided between bankers and gentlemen ranchers, like Captain Daniel Forrester, and homesteaders and hand-workers (7). Resentful, scheming Ivy Peters is the challenger, an agent of the decline of such gentility. Niel Herbert, Cathers limited point-of-view character, himself pretentious and somewhat prissy, is its staunch defender, and the German Blum boys, its servants. The novel carefully charts decline, from Ivys opening remark about the Captains lady, Marian Forrester, Im just as good as she is (18), to his joining his hands over her breast near the end, at which point Niel dismisses her as a common woman (16162). Ironically, the Captains noblesse oblige during his banks failure in the Panic of 1893 brings ruin to his wife. Alone among his banks directors, he sacrifices certain securities and government bonds so that his depositors (railroad employees, mechanics, day-laborersmany of them immigrants) should not lose a dollar. In need, Marian turns to Ivy Peters, who, in effect, replaces the Captain. Without titles or official status, such a social aristocracy gives way, surrenders, in Edith Whartons words, an old tradition of European culture and suffers moral impoverishment (A Backward Glance 7). Niels reading of the Bohn classics (Byron, Fielding, Goethe, Montaigne, and the love stories in Ovids Heroides, which I argue elsewhere is a major source of Cathers novel [Euripides]), and his admiration for the Captain and his lordly peers seems to make him the likely heir, although, alas, he himself becomes a part of the decline he laments, a petty young man, but without the pragmatic resourcefulness he abhors in Peters. There are neither reveries of nor visits to Europe in A Lost Lady. Later Novels The Professors House (1925), Cathers modernist experiment, at once exemplifies and exhausts the prevailing modernist form of her era (Millington 49). It both visits and is haunted by the Europe, particularly France, Cather knew firsthand. There are several European or ethnic European characters: the St. Peter family seamstress, Augusta, is German-American; landlord Appelhoff is a German immigrant; the German Fechtig hauls away the Blue Mesa artifacts; Tom Outlands tutor, Father Duchne, is Belgian; castaway Englishman Henry Atkins is Tom and Roddy Blakes cook. References to European letters, art, and music heavily pepper the text: Virgils Aeneid; Caesars Gallic War; Euripides and his Medea; Lucretius; Plutarch; Shakespeares Othello, MacBeth, Antony and Cleopatra; Aucassin and Nicolette; Swifts Gullivers Travels; Defoes Robinson Crusoe; Anatole Frances 59 Le Mannequin dosier; Brahmss Requiem; Thomass Mignon; the Bayeux tapestry, Dalous Monument to Delacroix. Political and historical references also underpin meaning here: the Crusades, the Age of Chivalry, the Great War, the Dreyfus case. Godfrey St. Peters affaire de coeur with France is sustained for many years on the pitch best described in a comment Ernest Hemingway is said to have made to a friend: If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast. St. Peters student years in Paris and his life with the Thierault family in Versailles are long and happy (32) and become a pleasant reflection in later years. Cather paints a poignant vignette of an All Souls Day he spent in Paris, breakfasting on the rue de Vaugirard, walking in the rain along rue St. Jacques and rue Soufflot toward the Panthon, everything wet, shiny, quick-silvery grey, accented by black crevices, and weather-worn bosses white as wood-ash. He bought pink dahlias from a young country couple, met a group of charity school girls in hideous dark uniforms, was prevented by a crowlike nun from giving his flowers to one pretty girl, and then strolled through the Luxembourg Gardens to Gare Saint-Lazare for the train back to Versailles (10103). Godfrey met his wife in this Paris Cather describes so convincingly, and both, when older and fraught with concerns, reflect on their youth there while attending Mignon in Chicago. How it does make one think of Paris, and of so many half-forgotten things, Lillian murmurs. He responds, its been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged (92). Yet the Professor had kept up the feast, enjoyed dashes back to France, staying with Charles Thierault in Marseilles, sailing out of the Gulf of Lions and along the southern Spanish coast, where one day looking up at the ranges of the Sierra Nevadas, he experienced an epiphany, and the design of his multi-volume Spanish Adventurers unfolded in the air above him (105). But subsequent disappointments with his wife and daughters, the death in Flanders of his companion Tom, and the torturous process of relinquishing the kind of second youth that proved to be in Bartley Alexanders case the most dangerous of companions (Alexanders Bridge 40), transform Godfreys moveable feast into a Lenten supper. He deeply regrets never vacationing with Tom in Paris. He had wanted to revisit certain spots with him: to go with him some autumn morning to the Luxembourg Gardens, when the yellow horse-chestnuts were bright and bitter after the rain, to stand with him before the monument to Delacroix and watch the sun gleam on the bronze figures (260). In deep despair, near the end, he thought he would like to drive up in front of Notre Dame, in Paris, again, and see it standing there like the Rock of Ages, with the frail generations breaking about its base (270). The image refers back to his earlier comments in the lecture hall on science and religion, about life being a rich thing [a]s long as 60 every man and woman who crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday was a principal in a gorgeous drama with God (68). The Easter reference prefigures the resurrection implications at the end of this novel, and the entire passage recalls Edith Lewiss account of her visit with Cather to Paris in 1920, that Cather wanted to live in the Middle Ages and spent nearly all [their] time in the section between the Seine and the Luxembourg gardens, and on the le de la Cit and the le-St. Louis (119). Many of Cathers critics had and have difficulty taking seriously, or at least not ironically, this direction of her career, especially those attempting to prove her a modernist or to define her modernism. In a recent review of Turkish novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinars The Time Regulation Institute, Martin Riker explains that some books are in a category all their own, in one sense new, in another sense old, as if to remind us that this thing called literature is much larger than our own little moment (11). Without taking Cather at face value to some extent, how do we account for Godfrey St. Peters discussions with seamstress Augusta on Holy Days, Ember Days, the Virgins litany, the Magnificat? Might these be fragments of a venture toward transcendence? The spiritual struggles of Myra Driscoll Henshawe in My Mortal Enemy (1926) bridge the Professors suffocation and the spiritual deliverance of Father Latour in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Myras story is haunted by Ireland, her material poverty a result of Irelands historical troubles. She is disowned by her wealthy Irish uncle for marrying the son of an Ulster man, but not before this uncle takes her to Ireland for a summer and has her portrait painted there. She exudes Irish pride: Oh, hear the penny whistle. They always find me out. She stopped a thin lad . . . playing The Irish Washerwoman on a little pipe, and rummaged in her bag for a coin (22). She play-acts in lilting Irishisms, especially at strategic moments: Be sure I did (7); If at any time a body was; Its not a woollen petticoat or warm mittens that Madame is needing (25); and me in a hansom cab (34); And we so safely hiddenin earth (52); Will you be pleased to take your things and go, Mrs. Casey. . . . Its owning to me infirmities . . . that Ill not be able to go as far as me door wid ye (73)this last a dismissal of the narrator for sympathizing with Myras husband, whom Myra suspects of infidelity. Of course, there are also the usual kinds of Cather European cultural references shedding light on the narrative, here exposing bits of Myras tragedy: to Shakespeare plays, Schillers Mary Stuart, Bellinis Norma, Schuberts paean to spring, a Heine poem on a tear from the past and one on a sinners flower. Chief among these references are the Casta Diva aria from Norma and Gloucesters cliff in King Lear. The aria reflects Myras conflict of loyalties between love for her husband and for her church and uncle, and the cliff image, submission to divine will. The crisis, between worldliness/mortal loves and submission to fate, is resolved in Myras unorthodox return to the Church Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 unorthodox in violating the general view of kindness and charity: In age we lose everything; even the power to love (72), she exclaims near the end. This return is colored in medieval and early Christian images: of a sinner coming home to an abbot or abbess to die, of candlelit catacombs and early saints. The image of Augusta standing like the Rock of Ages has its counterpart here in Myras body wrapped in her [Austrian] blankets, leaning against the cedar trunk, facing the sea. Her head . . . fallen forward; the ebony crucifix . . . in her hands (8182). She has let go what Professor St. Peter had let go, perhaps experiencing something similar to what Claude Wheeler had while looking up at the rose window at St. Ouen. As her attending priest confides to the narrator, Shes not at all modern in her make-up, is she? (76). is true of our introduction to Bishop Latour as he makes his way through the confusion of conical hills in the New Mexico desert. The placing of this scene abruptly subsequent to the elegant clerical dinner and the sun flashing on the metallic surface of Michelangelos great dome is startling, yet relieved by Latours discovery of correspondences between this new country and Europe: the wooden figures of the saints in New Mexico resemble the homely stone carvings on the front of old parish churches in Auvergne (28), and the water-head at Agua Secreta, where arrow-heads and corroded Spanish medals and a sword hilt had been found, were like those well-heads in his own country where the Roman settlers had set up the image of a river goddess, and later the Christian priests had planted a cross (33). We might ask the same of Cather at this stage of her career. Facing cultural degeneration and loss, she turned elsewhere for a subject. [S]he was put to the critical labor of finding a purer past . . . that could propose images that would last forever, writes Marcus Klein, and discovered an aesthetic proposed by Catholicism. . . . It was not the doctrinal Church that attracted her. But there was a magnitude in Catholicism that was sufficient to her, and a tradition . . . so ancient as to be effectively out of time (xvxvi). Our first response might be that Cathers view of the Church was the nave idealized one of an outsider, yet a careful consideration of the two great Catholic novels and the Avignon fragment distinguishing her final phase indicates her awareness of corruption, abuse, politicking, exploitation, peacockery, and arrogance in an organization that also embraced the devout, the gentle in spirit, the merciful, those who hunger for justice. Nor can her discovery of the Church be confined to the 1920s. The June 10, 1908 postcard she sent her brother Roscoe from Rome, depicting the dome of St. Peters from Villa Dorea Pomphili, suggests interest in the eternal qualities Klein singles out. As the dome looms up from the east, she writes, it is borne in upon one that there is where the modern world was born. From the day Charlemagne was crowned there and before, the Vatican was fashioning modern Europe. Next in wonder to the Rome of the Empire is the Catholic Rome of the middle ages (Selected Letters 113). Another jarring experience occurs at the missionaries first Christmas in Santa Fe. After Father Vaillants struggle to produce a French meal with native substitutes and Latours return home in spirit while writing to his brother, when the two sit down to converse in French and enjoy dinner with French wine, their thoughts meeting in the tilted cobble street, winding down a hill, with the uneven garden walls and tall horse-chestnuts on either side, they are startled by drunken cowboys and Indians, rifleshots and blood-curdling yells . . . and the galloping of horses (44). Variations of such contrasts are repeated throughout the text, perhaps the most significant when Latour decides against retiring in France, finding himself homesick for New Mexico while in Clermont. Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up to him for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert. . . . he had come back to die in exile for the sake of . . . [s]omething soft and wild and free . . . (28788). Nevertheless, it is exile. Indeed, this postcard to Roscoe informs the Prologue of Death Comes for the Archbishop, a scene in a villa (albeit in the distant Sabine Hills rather than the proximate Pomphili Gardens) dominated by a view of St. Peters. The Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock (1931), which Cather, with a reluctance to leave that world of Catholic feeling and tradition (Lewis 155), was to write next, are narratives spliced by European (mostly French) scenes. They are of various types and serve these texts in various ways. Some illuminate Dorothy Canfield Fishers hypothesis that the subject of Cathers books is the effect a new country . . . has on people transplanted to it from the old traditions of a stable, complex civilization (quoted in Woodress 452). Certainly this www.WillaCather.org Heres a brief sampling of the profuse returns to and echoes of Europe in this novel: awakened by the Angelus bell ringing from San Miguel, Latour imagines he is in Rome, near St. John Lateran; discovering the yellow hill from which his cathedral will be quarried, he almost feels he is facing Avignons Papal Palace; in Stone Lips and when travelling through the mesa country, French Gothic architecture becomes the analogy. In a revealing scene in Vaillants sisters convent in Riom, Latour is taken to a window opening upon a blind street by a young nun who helps sew vestments for Vaillant. She explains that for her, when she stands by this window, the strange landscape of New Mexico is beyond the turn of the street, and Mother Philomne pictures her brother and the Bishop moving through [this landscape] in their cassocks, bareheaded, like the pictures of St. Francis Xavier with which she was familiar (68). Similarly patterned in accordion-like folds, moving back and forth between the familiar and unfamiliar, France and America, Shadows on the Rock represents a long step backward toward the Middle Ages. The medieval Midi Romanesque cathedral Latour 61 builds near the end of his life has its northern counterpart in the opening description of Quebec. The scattered spires and slated roofs of the French stronghold were roughly Norman Gothic in effect. They were made by people from the north of France who knew no other way of building (8, 10). Covered in snow, Quebec seemed shrunk to a mere group of shivering spires; the whole rock looked like one great white church . . . (159). The explicit comparison of the town to a theatric European Nativity scene and the implied one to the Counter-Reformation fortress altar of Notre Dame de la Victoire guarding the sacred Host manifests the wellordered universe mentally occupied by the sisters and bequeathed to Christendom by Thomas Aquinas in the late Middle Ages. Within this context the reader is offered several devotional accounts: the apparition of the Bayeux sinner Marie to Mother Catherine de Saint-Augustin requesting prayers; the life of Father Nol Chabanel, professor priest of Toulouse, who committed himself to a tortuous mission among the Hurons and suffered martyrdom by the Iroquois; the miracle of the ape of Saint-Malo; the apparition of the Child Jesus to Saint Edmund of Canterbury promising lifelong protection. Threatening this tidy world are forces best descried by the adjective sauvage, indigenous peoples and their habitat, the forest, the dead, sealed world of the vegetable kingdom . . . choked with interlocking trees . . . strangling each other in a slow agony . . . (11), the counterpart here of the confusing desert landscape that confronts Father Latour in New Mexico. The theme of exile is at the heart of Shadows and of the conflict between Ccile Auclair and her father, Euclide, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec (7). He dines at the hour he did in Paris to keep civilized and French, and reminds Ccile of life at home on the Quai des Clestins in the parish of Saint-Paul to refresh her early memories of the old shop there where she was born. He tells of his excitement as a boy when Count Frontenac returned after several years to his townhouse adjacent to this shop. Many of Auclairs reminiscences are dark ones of injustices and starvationof knifegrinder Bichet, who was tortured and hanged for stealing two brass kettles; of people dying of starvation in the streets of Paris, even in his own parish, while Court life at Versailles grew increasingly lavishyet his overriding desire is to return. Ccile, however, was only four when she sailed to Canada, and only thought she could remember it [Paris] a little (23). For her, Quebec is home, although she remains faithful to her dying mothers instructions to sustain life in the French manner and keep it from being disgusting, like [the lives] of the poor savages (32). Ccile stays very much a daughter of France, albeit a foreign shore to her (123), and when she visits the Harnois farm on the le dOrlans is so disgusted by the effect of the forest on domestic life that she rededicates herself to French ways because they are now hers. The feeling of exile is most evident when Count Frontenac prepares for death and instructs Auclair to have his heart returned 62 to Paris in a lead box, to Saint-Nicholas-des-Champs. Both men, deeply disappointed at not being able to return to France, were thinking of a scene outside the windows, under the low November skybut the river was not the St. Lawrence. They were looking out on the Pont-Marie, and the hay-barges tied up at the Port-au-Foin. On an afternoon like this the boatmen would be covering the hay-bales with tarpaulins . . . and about this time the bells always rang from the Clestins and the church of Saint-Paul (288). They discuss the changes that have occurred in this section of Paris and on the le Saint-Louis, a locale very familiar to Cather as was its history. Auclair lives on in Quebec to enjoy Cciles growing family and comes to terms with a place removed from the upsetting events in Versailles: he believed that he was indeed fortunate to spend his old age here where nothing changed; to watch his grandsons grow up in a country where the death of the King, the probable evils of a long regency, would never touch them (321). Yet France still haunts Auclair, as it does Latour, and his resignation to fortune is the muted equivalent of the Archbishops release into the morning. Last Novels Cathers last completed novels, Lucy Gayheart (1935) and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), swerve from the drift toward Catholicism evident in her previous four novels. In Lucy Gayheart she returns to the prairie and Chicago as settings, although in such a general way that her novel could be set in New England or Pennsylvania. This story of a pianist who outgrows her small country town and leaves to study in Chicago recalls The Song of the Lark, even to the German landlady. Europe haunts primarily through music, used thematically to complement Lucys vacillating and arrested development, from the first lied she hears Clement Sebastian sing, Schuberts Lied eines Schiffers an die DioskurenThe Sailors Song to the Twin Starsto her realization before her death that the air from Mendelssohns Elijah, in which she accompanied Sebastian, refers to lifes fugitive gleam, which can be an actual possession (19495). (Cather changed the oratorio text in question from If with all your hearts ye truly seek Me, ye shall ever surely find Me to If with all your heart you truly seek Him, you shall ever surely find Him.) Sebastian himself is a Europeanized Chicagoan, having left at eighteen to live abroad. His life crisis and involvement with Lucy is encapsulated in his performance of Schuberts Die Winterreise song cycle: he presented [the melancholy youth] as if he were a memory, not to be brought too near into the present. One felt a long Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 distance between the singer and the scenes he was recalling, a long perspective (40). This distance had been bridged by the talented youth Sebastian had adopted until his wifes jealousy drove the boy to a boarding school. Now, nearing fifty, estranged from his wife, without a family or even a country, Sebastian finds, perhaps takes advantage of, impressionable, young Lucy. His European elegance and simplicity make Lucys hometown boyfriend, Harry Gordon, seem crude and self-important, and when Harry proposes marriage and makes light of her fling in Chicago, Lucy refuses him with a liethis within the context of a week of Italian and German opera and a visit to a loan exhibit of French Impressionists. Harrys joyless marriage on the rebound and his remorse after Lucys death lead him to Red Cross work in France during the Great War that claimed both Claude Wheeler and Tom Outland. There are obvious echoes in this novel of both The Professors House and Alexanders Bridge, including from the latter the drowning of Sebastian in Lake Como. Mark Madigan cites a July 17 postcard Cather sent to her brother Roscoe during her 1908 visit there, describing a wild day on the water, as the genesis of this scene (18). In the novel, the contents of the cablegram from Milan are included in a newspaper account: Yesterday Clement Sebastian and James Mockford [his accompanist] were drowned when . . . the hurricane from the mountains broke upon them [and their] boat was turned over immediately. . . . Mockford must have fastened himself to his companion with a strangle-hold and dragged him down. The bodies had not yet been recovered (14647). For its visual impact this macabre, European-set episode recalls the Russian wolves story in My ntonia. In 1938 Cather returned to Back Creek Valley in Frederick Country, Virginia, to reacquaint herself with her birthplace as the setting for Sapphira and the Slave Girl, based on her own early memories, the lives of her maternal ancestors, and Frederick County history prior to the Civil War. Edith Lewis describes the visit as memorable, intense and thrilling (182). Written some seventeen years after A Lost Lady, Sapphira seems a prototype of the earlier novel, which depicts a post-Civil War diluted Western version of a stratified Southern-style society. Europe in Sapphira is decidedly British, with a dash of French added for intrigue. Sapphira Dodderidge, the slave-owning mistress, boasts an English mother and Back Creek Valley land deeded to her ancestors by Thomas, Lord Fairfax in 1747. Here, Henry Colbert, whom she stooped to marry, operates a mill. Henrys ancestors are French, from Flanders, and his brothers, notorious rakehells. Both Sapphira and Henry are from Loudoun County, east of the mountains, whose aristocratic residents looked down on Back Creek Valley folks. Sapphiras carriage is decorated with a British heraldic crest, and in her dropsical condition, she is carried about like a queen in a throne-like chair affixed to poles. Her personal house slave, Till, slave girl Nancys mother, was raised by the Dodderidges English www.WillaCather.org housekeeper, and thus prefers quality people, is able to read, write, and possesses what Ccile Auclair would term kind ways. Nancys great-grandmother, the matriarch Jezebel, was captured from an African tribe of cannibals, came to America on a British slaver, and was eventually bought by the Dodderidges. Contributing to the novels social layering are rivalries within the descending order of Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Baptists. If Sapphira and the Slave Girl can be connected to the four novels prior to Lucy Gayheart, it would be through the English hymns, the King James Bible, and the works of John Bunyan that Henry seeks comfort in during his moral dilemmas. He is puzzled that nowhere did his Bible say that there should be no one in bonds (112), and turns to William Cowpers God moves in a mysterious way for an answer in Gods design (113). His struggles with his carnality as a Colbert and with his ambiguous fondness for Nancy, which has estranged him from his wife, are relieved somewhat by Bunyans The Pilgrims Progress. He diminishes the slave girls sexuality by identifying her with Bunyans Mercy. When his nephew chases her, he feels the poison in the young scamps blood [stirring] something in his own (208), and reads in Bunyans The Holy War the conquest of Mansoul by Diabolus, then finds consolation in its retaking by Prince Emmanuel, who apprehended Carnal-sense, and put him in hold (210). A direct connection to Shadows on the Rock and the unfinished Avignon story, Hard Punishments, is where Baptist minister Fairhead watches Sapphiras granddaughter Mary take up the bowl of broth that cures her of the diphtheria that claims the life of her sister: A white figure emerged from the stairway and drifted across the indoor duskiness of the room. It was Mary, barefoot, in her nightgown, as if she were walking in her sleep. She reached the table . . . and lifted the bowl of broth in her two hands. . . . She drank slowly, resting her elbows on the table. Streaks of firelight from the stove flickered over her. . . . There was something solemn in what he saw through the window, like a Communion service. (255) Willa Cather, after years of being haunted by Europe, set to work on a short novel dmeubl set entirely in Avignon, France, within and around the Papal Palace, the building Cather first saw in 1902 and, according to Lewis, stirred her as no building in the world had ever done (190). Among the fragments left us of this unfinished work is a scene depicting Midnight Mass in the Old Chapel of Benedict XII. It is circa 1340, and the principals are two boys mutilated for crimes against the papal state and the old, almost blind priest who befriends them: While the tenor priest from Toulouse was singing the mass, Father [Ambrose] closed his eyes and shut off even such poor sight as he had, to rest the more wholly upon the music and the beautiful words. And in the cadence of the 63 priest he seemed to sense the awe of the close-packed crowd around him,like a heart beating under his hand. . . . The priest from Toulouse sang the last beautiful words, Natus est, here among them[,] within them. In his own heart, Father Ambrose knew[.] And beside him he felt the shiver of delight that ran through his pupil Andre, and a sob he heard from that unfortunate creature with the useless hands. Yes, He made the blind to see, the lame to walk, the dumb to speak,and to all the future a release from bondage. . . . (Avignon 5) Near the end, Im tempted to conclude, Cathers journey approached the heart of the Christian story in her beloved France. WORKS CITED Bennett, Mildred R. The World of Willa Cather. 1951. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1961. Cather, Willa. Alexanders Bridge. 1912. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. Tom Quirk and Frederick M. Link. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. 2007. . The Avignon Story. Manuscript Fragments of Willa Cathers Last Unpublished StoryHard Punishments. Transcriptions by Andrew Jewell and Kari Ronning. Willa Cather Newsletter & Review 55.2 (2011): 47. . Death Comes for the Archbishop. 1927. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. John J. Murphy, Charles W. Mignon, Frederick M. Link, and Kari A. Ronning. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. .A Lost Lady. 1923. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. Susan J. Rosowski, Kari A. Ronning, Charles W. Mignon, and Frederick M. Link. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997. .Lucy Gayheart. 1935. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. David Porter, Kari A. Ronning, and Frederick M. Link. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2015. .My ntonia. 1918. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. Charles Mignon, Kari Ronning, James Woodress, Kathleen Danker, and Emily Levine. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1994. .My Mortal Enemy. 1926. New York: Vintage, 1990. .One of Ours. 1922. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed.  Richard C. Harris, Frederick M. Link, and Kari A. Ronning. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2006. .On Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art. New York: Knopf, 1949. .O Pioneers! 1913. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. Susan J. Rosowski, Charles W. Mignon, Kathleen Danker, and David Stouck. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992. .The Professors House. 1925. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. 64 Ed. James Woodress, Kari A. Ronning, and Frederick M. Link. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002. .Sapphira and the Slave Girl. 1940. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. Ann Romines, Charles W. Mignon, Kari A. Ronning, and Frederick M. Link. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2009. .The Selected Letters of Willa Cather. Ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout. New York: Knopf, 2013. .Shadows on the Rock. 1931. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. John J. Murphy, David Stouck, and Frederick M. Link. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2005. .The Song of the Lark. 1915. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Ed. Ann Moseley and Kari A. Ronning. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2012. .Willa Cather in Europe. New York: Knopf, 1956. .The World and the Parish: Willa Cathers Articles and Reviews, 18931902. Ed. William M. Curtin. 2 vols. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1970. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. 1964. Vintage-Random House, 2000. Kates, George N. Incidental Notes. Willa Cather in Europe. New York: Knopf, 1956. passim. Klein, Marcus. Introduction. My Mortal Enemy. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1961. vxxii. Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. 1953. Bison Edition. Ed. John J. Murphy. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000. Madigan, Mark. Paestum: An Unpublished Poem from Cathers Grand Tour of Italy. Willa Cather Newsletter & Review 55.2 (2011): 1724. Millington, Richard H. Willa Cathers Two Modernisms. Letterature dAmerica 33.144 (2013): 4156. Murphy, John J. A Comprehensive View of Cathers O Pioneers!. In Critical Essays on Willa Cather. Ed. John J. Murphy. Boston: Hall, 1984. 11327. .Euripides Hippolytus and Cathers A Lost Lady. American Literature 53.1 (1981): 7286. .My ntonia: The Road Home. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Riker, Martin. A Ramshackle Modernity. New York Times Book Review (5 January 2014): 11. Romines, Ann. The Well-Furnished Table. Letterature dAmerica 33.144 (2013): 7796. Shively, Steven B.The Damning Echo of Nebraska in Willa Cathers One of Ours. Letterature dAmerica 33.144 (2013): 2540. Stefan, Paul. Anton Dvok. Trans. Y. W. Vance. New York: Greystone, 1941. Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. New York: AppletonCentury, 1934. Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987. Willa Cather Newsletter & Review | Winter 2015 Willa Cather NEWSLET TER & R EVIEW Volume 58 z No. 2 | Winter 2015 The Willa Cather Foundation Established 1955 by Mildred Bennett Ashley Olson, Executive Director www.WillaCather.org 2015 Willa Cather Foundation Issue Editor: Robert Thacker Guest Issue Coeditors: Andrew Jewell, Mark J. Madigan, John J. Murphy Managing Editor: Thomas Reese Gallagher Copy Editors: Virgil Albertini and Dolores Albertini Design: Bunny Zaruba Design Issue Editors Ann Romines, The George Washington University Steven B. Shively, Utah State University Robert Thacker, St. Lawrence University The Willa Cather Newsletter & Review welcomes scholarly essays, notes, news items, and letters. Scholarly essays should generally not exceed 5,000 words, although longer essays may be considered; they should be submitted in Microsoft Word as e-mail attachments and should follow current MLA guidelines as articulated in the Seventh Edition of the MLA Handbook. Direct essays and inquiries to Ann Romines at annrom3@verizon.net. Send letters and inquiries to Thomas Reese Gallagher at tgallagher@nyc.rr.com. The Willa Cather Newsletter & Review (ISSN 0197-663X) is published three times a year by: The Willa Cather Foundation 413 North Webster Street Red Cloud NE 68970 402-746-2653 866-731-7304 E-mail: info@willacather.org Board of Governors Officers Thomas Reese Gallagher, President Lynette Krieger, Vice President Glenda Pierce, Secretary David Porter, Treasurer Susan N. Maher, Past President Board Members Virgil Albertini Marion A. Arneson Mark W. Bostock Max Despain Katherine Endacott Sarah Baker Hansen Richard C. Harris Jill Hornady Andrew Jewell Charles Johanningsmeier Ruth H. Keene Fritz Mountford John J. Murphy Julie Olin-Ammentorp Charles A. Peek Guy Reynolds Ann Romines Nancy Sherwood Steven B. Shively Amy Springer C. Kay Stahly Robert Thacker Lu Williams John A ( Jay) Yost Advisory Members Bruce P. Baker II Laurie Smith Camp James L. Fitzgibbon David B. Garwood Joel Geyer Jane Renner Hood Ron Hull Betty Kort Mellanee Kvasnicka Lucia Woods Lindley Gary L. Meyer Nancy S. Picchi Rhonda Seacrest James P. Southwick John N. Swift Gary W. Thompson Joseph R. Urgo No part of the Willa Cather Newsletter & Review may be reprinted without the permission of the Willa Cather Foundation. Editorial Board Virgil Albertini, Fairway, Kansas Bruce P. Baker II, Omaha, Nebraska Richard C. Harris, Webb Institute Charles Johanningsmeier, University of Nebraska Omaha Susan Maher, University of Minnesota Duluth John J. Murphy, Newton, Massachusetts Julie Olin-Ammentorp, Le Moyne College David Porter, Skidmore College Ann Romines, The George Washington University Steven B. Shively, Utah State University John N. Swift, Occidental College Robert Thacker, St. Lawrence University Joseph Urgo, University of North Carolina Asheville www.WillaCather.org An illustration by Pruett Carter from the 1935 serialization of Cathers Lucy Gayheart in Womans Home Companion. See page 29 for additional illustrations in the series. 65 I got my guide book for Rome the other day. Seems queer to be really on the way to Rome; for of course Rome has always existed for one, it was a central fact in ones life in Red Cloud and was always the Capital of ones imagination. Rome, London, and Paris were serious matters when I went to the South ward school they were the three principal cities in Nebraska, so to speak. Willa Cather writing to her brother Roscoe, March 2, 1908. From The Selected Letters of Willa Cather www.WillaCather.org  ...