This seminar will explore the writing of Willa Cather--after Faulkner, the most distinguished American fiction writer of the twentieth century. We will work chronologically: reading some of the early, "Jamesian" short stories; witnessing her return to the Nebraska of her childhood for a set of subjects and strategies she felt to be more truly her own; tracking her emergence as the creator of a distinctive, lucid, and obliquely revolutionary American modernism.

After years of relative neglect, Cather's work has been of late attracting the critical attention it deserves. While our main focus will be on developing our own account of the experience of reading Cather--a project that, in my view, is excitingly incomplete--I want to devote some of our time to understanding and assessing some of the most interesting critical approaches to Cather's texts, ranging from strong traditional essays to the insights offered by feminist, historicist, and queer theory approaches to her fiction. Students should leave the seminar, then, in possession of their own understanding of Cather's achievement as a writer, and with some sense of our present moment in literary criticism. I will expect utterly prepared participation in class discussions. I anticipate assigning several brief essays (keyed to the week's discussion, with interpretive positions presented orally), and a longer essay due at the end of the term.