Beginning My Antonia

Beginning My Antonia

Looked at on its own, My Antonia is interesting in lots of ways: its narrative frame, the long arc of its story, the way that long story seems to eschew conflict, romance, climax, and indeed most of the traditional features of plot development, the calm, measured tone that strikes many readers as a kind of understatement, the extreme violence that periodically punctuates that calm tone, and so on.  But these features are particularly interesting to me in the way they relate to a lot of other writing of the same period.  Willa Cather was not exactly a modernist writer, and My Antonia is not exactly a modernist text, but her books could not have been written in an earlier period, and she shares many methods and concerns with writers we usually think of as modernists.  So while you read the novel on our own, at home, we will also read together, in class, some key works by Hemingway, Eliot, Williams, Pound and Moore.

Here are some particular things, pulled off the top of my head, to look at as you begin the novel:

• What is the effect of the narrative frame that Cather sets up at the outset?

• How does Cather set up her main character, the narrator? 

• How does the novel set up, right at the beginning, the sense that this is a new novel, a story that is about a changed world, a story that is not being told in the traditional way?

• How does Cather handle description?

• How does the landscape function in the book?

• How does understatement work in the novel?

• How does the novel evoke emotion?

• How is the novel like, and unlike, the stories by Hemingway and the poems by Eliot, Williams and Pound that we will read--like them not only in technique, but in feeling, in theme?

• Do these techniques work for you?  Do these feelings resonate with you?

As we go forward, I will post some of my thoughts, and I will post some of your thoughts, as well.  Feel free to comment on any post, but please be thoughtful and considerate when you do, and please don't comment anonymously.