WILLA CATHER AND PLACE
Willa Cather was born in 1873 in a rural area near Winchester, Virginia, spent her adolescence and early twenties in Nebraska, first in rural and small-town south central Nebraska and then in the capital city and university town of Lincoln, spent a decade living and working in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and finally spent the last forty years of her life as a New York City resident who traveled frequently inside and outside the United States. Her fiction depicts a broad range of experiences on the North American continent, but she is best known for her novels fictionalizing the Nebraska countryside and her Nebraska hometown of Red Cloud in the late nineteenth century: O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), My Ántonia (1918), and A Lost Lady (1923). These novels, select early short stories, and her later short story collection Obscure Destinies (1932) will be the central focus of the institute. Cather continued to make long visits to family in Nebraska after she moved away in 1896, but, paradoxically, she wrote her fiction so strongly grounded in Webster County elsewhere—in New York City apartments, in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and on Grand Manan, a Canadian island in the Bay of Fundy.
O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia celebrate the lives of female immigrant heroines and children of immigrants at a moment when the United States was on the verge of restricting immigration. Eastern European immigrants were targeted as undesirable in debates about restricting immigration, and the state of Nebraska as a whole was second only to Illinois as a destination for immigrants from Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) and was the top destination for Czech rural settlement. Nevertheless, Bohemian immigrants made up a relatively small proportion of immigrants in Webster County, but based on her contact with particular Bohemian immigrants during her adolescence, Bohemians came to occupy an outsized place in Cather’s literary imagination and will receive particular attention during the institute.
Taking a critical approach to the history of south-central Nebraska as a place, the institute will also engage its Indigenous history, which Cather ignores or only glancingly engages. For example, she writes of Alexandra Bergson, the Swedish immigrant protagonist of O Pioneers!, “For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning”—but what about the Kitakahaki band of the Pawnee, who made their home in the Republican River Valley for centuries? (indeed, the Kitakahaki band was also known as the Republican band, and the river was named for them). In My Ántonia, narrator Jim Burden recalls “a great circle” that was “faintly marked in the grass where the Indians used to ride.” Readers might presume from the faintness of the markings that these Indians were long gone. However, when Cather family members first moved to the Republican River Valley in early 1870s, the Kitakahaki, under pressure from Euro-American incursion into the area, had only recently moved further north, and they periodically returned to the area on hunting expeditions. One of the ways in which the institute will recognize the Pawnee presence in a region sometimes called “Catherland” is by having participants read The Sea of Grass, a historical novel by Walter Echo-Hawk (Pawnee)—Echo-Hawk will also be a faculty member. The role of the railroad in Cather’s fiction and in Euro-American settlement and development of the area will also receive particular attention.
In the 1950s, a group of residents of Red Cloud founded the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial to document and preserve sites associated with Cather’s Nebraska fiction. At what is now called the National Willa Cather Center (NWCC), one can encounter buildings and landscapes described in her fiction. At the NWCC, scholars can also explore an archive of books, manuscripts, and objects associated with Cather, her family, and Webster County. Furthermore, the NWCC has recently created virtual tours of many of its buildings and a digital database of objects in its collection. Like Cather’s fiction, the original name of the NWCC celebrated Euro-American pioneers while ignoring the Indigenous people forced from their traditional territory to make way for settlement. In its ongoing work of interpreting its sites and providing educational programming, the NWCC is seeking to address this erasure of Indigenous presence.
WILLA CATHER AND ARCHIVES
In biography and criticism, Cather has long been characterized as obsessed with privacy and with exercising complete control over the forms in which her books were published. These ideas were underwritten, in part, by her supposed routine destruction of letters and working drafts of her fiction during her lifetime and the continuing destruction of such documents after her 1947 death by her partner and literary executor, Edith Lewis. At the time such claims were first made, libraries held only about a thousand of her letters, and a group of literary manuscripts Lewis donated to the New York Public Library shortly after Cather’s death were ignored.
In the recent archival turn in scholarship, there has often been a focus on what has been excluded from or occluded in archives as institutions associated with state and cultural power, including the exclusions of LGBTQ and women’s experiences from the archival record. Nevertheless, Cather materials have long been avidly sought by libraries and claims about routine letter destruction over-reached the modest reality of a few particular cases. Cather did once seem to fit such feminist and queer critiques of traditional archives, but the current challenge is plenitude rather than scarcity. In Archives and Special Collections at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) Libraries, researchers can examine the largest group of Cather-related items in the world, including the largest group of literary manuscripts, the most letters (over 650), other one-of-a-kind Cather-related items, and a wide variety of editions of her works. The Willa Cather Archive (a project of the UNL Libraries) will soon be completing the digital publication of the Complete Letters of Willa Cather. This resource makes Cather’s letters held by UNL libraries and scores of other repositories and private collections freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The Cather Archive will also begin work in February 2023 on A Digital Library of Willa Cather’s Literary Manuscripts.
Digitally remediated materials present exciting new opportunities for both research and teaching. Like all digital resources, they also represent challenges for those who do not fully understand the principles on which they were constructed. Computational approaches to texts can also generate powerful insights, but for people not trained in the methodology, their claims can be difficult to understand. The institute will not train participants as digital humanities producers. Rather, it will aim to make them better informed users of Cather-related digital resources and to understand the power (and limits) of computational approaches.
FORMAT AND READINGS
The two in-person weeks in Nebraska from 16 July 2023 to 28 July 2023 will be divided between seminar style discussions, workshops, placed-based experiences and tours of key sites, and dedicated time in the archives in both Lincoln and Red Cloud. Although there will be crossovers between the themes of place and archive, the primary focus of the first week will be place and the second week archive. Seminars and workshops will be led by experienced Cather researchers from inside and outside UNL and by library and cultural institution professionals (for more see the PROJECT TEAM page). A PDF of a detailed syllabus (tentative and subject to change) can be downloaded here.
Because of space and staffing constraints in the reading rooms of both UNL Special Collections and the National Willa Cather Center, the amount of time allotted for individual archival research will be limited, but separate funding for return trips may be available from the Nebraska Cather Collaborative Research Grants program.
NEH PRINCIPLES OF CIVILITY
Principles of Civility for NEH Professional Development Programs
NEH Seminars, Institutes, and Landmarks programs are intended to extend and deepen knowledge and understanding of the humanities by focusing on significant topics, texts, and issues; contribute to the intellectual vitality and professional development of participants; and foster a community of inquiry that provides models of excellence in scholarship and teaching.
NEH expects that project directors will take responsibility for encouraging an ethos of openness and respect, upholding the basic norms of civil discourse.
Seminar, Institute, and Landmarks presentations and discussions should be:
- firmly grounded in rigorous scholarship, and thoughtful analysis;
- conducted without partisan advocacy;
- respectful of divergent views;
- free of ad hominem commentary; and
- devoid of ethnic, religious, gender, disability, or racial bias.
NEH welcomes comments, concerns, or suggestions on these principles at questions@neh.gov.