Will it Never End?

Seriously.... I feel like this is the term from hell, and winter break promises little relief. The paper is in process, but I am not sure it is making any sense. Oh well. I will simply be glad to be done with it.

Birthday

Yes. Today I am 31.... I still procrastinate.... 9 more pages to go.

Introduction So Far

On November 9, 1989 representatives from fifteen countries gathered together to discuss the politics of food. From their discussion the Slow Food International movement was formed and began to promote their manifesto that, “[i]n the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer” (“Manifesto” par. 8). Since its inception the Slow Food movement has spread to 122 countries. This movement is not the only one of its kind. In recent years the focus on food has been a critical part of the ecological movement, introducing new concepts and even new language to describe the human relationship with food (locavore for example). These movements represent a sensible ordering of thought around a logical central idea. Food is a logical point around which to organize ones feelings and actions regarding their relationship to nature and resource use, because food is one of the few items that make obvious human reliance on and interconnection with the natural world.

The body of American literature contains multitudes of works focused on humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Many of these works, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, rely upon a worldview which vilifies the urban and elevates the wild as a sacred place apart. This tension between urban and wild is a central element in Willa Cather’s 1925 novel The Professor’s House. Characters such as Tom Outland and Louis Marsellus seem emblematic of this dichotomy. Even their names provide support for this concept, Outland (out-land) as the mesa dwelling place apart, and Marsellus (mar-sell- us) as the eager capitalist who Cather portrays as corrupter of Outland’s legacy. While this division has been widely accepted in many circles for generations, the concepts of glorified “wild” and vilified “capitalist” are not in the end polar opposites, but rather reflections of a similar human desire to manipulate and organize the natural world while conveniently ignoring the relationship between humanity and nature that exists at all levels of landscape.

A useful place for interrogating this binary in The Professor’s House rests in Cather’s representation of gardens. According to garden enthusiast and philosopher Mara Miller, “[t]he task of the garden is to mediate those tensions or polarities which are important for a given culture” (25).

Ending with a Boom/ Beginning with Slow Food

It was the last regular day of 121 for my classes today. We ended on a great note, especially in my 10 am class. They were so intensely interested and interactive, it was tremendous. We laughed and joked and learned. I was totally delighted by the experience and I hope some of them will end up in my 214 class. 

In my own work, I've been pleasantly surprised to find that very little has been done addressing food and ecocriticism. In my brief preliminary search I found only a few links. One of the most interesting was a Call For Papers that I wish I'd found sooner.  Even this however does not make the link between food, ecocriticism and fiction. It seems much more interested in the literature of slow food or locavore movements. 

I am eager to really begin the paper, hopefully my enthusiasm will last. 

I also need to find a copy of "Loving Ourselves Best of All". A brief glance at this article has me pretty excited.

Ecocriticism and the Locavore

Today I started working on the introductory paragraphs of my Cather seminar paper. In the paper I intend to look at how productive garden's in The Professor's House occupy a place between the idealized wild and vilified city. For me the garden is a place that destabilizes the civilization/nature binary. 

To kick off the essay I've begun by looking at how food has become intimately related with ecology and environmental movements. I will claim that food is a logical point around which to organize ones feelings and actions regarding their relationship to nature and resource use... then examine it in the Cather novel... 

It is only a beginning, but if feels like a good move.

After the IL Summit

As the readers likely know, Friday was the Information Literacy Summit. I was rather nervous about presenting there but over all it went well. It was interesting to listen in on the conversations about who is responsible for teaching IL in the classrooms. Many people seem to be fine with the job being seated in composition classrooms while others seem to take it as a slight. I think that overall there is a sense that Information Literacy is everyone's business. There are different levels of specificity in IL just like in everything else and those levels can't all be covered in one or two comp. classes. 

I really enjoyed teaching Information Literacy in a more detailed way. If ever I was given the opportunity to co-teach an info lit class I would jump at the chance. Before going to OSU I had seriously considered an MLIS degree. I loved working in libraries and the idea of being a University Librarian is still very appealing, but I love teaching in the classroom so perhaps the Ph.D. seems the most obvious choice.

Who knows...all I know is that I need to focus on the immediate future and this imminent Cather paper... meh

The Three-way Dance

In Betj's class today I noticed that I see in two of Cather's novels (Death Comes for the Arch-Bishop and The Professor's House) an argument for an intermediary space between to "poles". In both of these books this intermediate space seems somehow related to gardens or orchards. I have not worked out all of my thoughts about this, but I do know that I totally adore both of these works of fiction and it will be a pleasure to write about them, I only wish I had more time.

In other news nothing has happened with the thesis....stasis.... I can only hope that my ecocritical work with other texts and in other contexts will prove fruitful when the time comes to crank out chapters.

Primal Scream

The past few days I have felt like I am just squeaking by. It's conference week so almost every minute of my day has been tightly packed with scheduled events. On top of this the term is winding down so there are many projects with fast approaching due dates.

I managed to get all of my reading done on Death Comes for the Arch-Bishop, which is great, because I actually enjoy this novel, (which means I got to do something I enjoy for a little bit) and I always feel miserable when I fail to complete the reading for Betj's class.  I also tapped into the Cather Studies website and found a bunch of info for my upcoming seminar paper. 

I have a presentation of sorts at the upcoming Information Literacy Summit which I haven't worked on much and will likely spend my weekend trying to tackle. There's also a draft due on Tuesday for my final paper in SJ's class, but I feel pretty much prepared for this.

It's nice out today, lightly overcast, warmish...

Fifteen conferences, two large assignments, and several chapters to go until the week-end

Arggg!

Cold and Confusion

I'm sick...not really sick, just sort of sick, but sick enough to be a little more brain dead than usual. The good news is that I've finished my grading.

Now it's on to drafting up my ideas for a seminar paper on Cather. still reading O Pioneers, which is almost as awesome as The Professor's House. It actually bares many disturbing similarities to a novel I was writing about Nebraska... odd... tis the season for odd...

Draw Me A Mesa

So today after Cather and Gilman, Betj and I had a tremendous discussion about The Professor's House (which is fast becoming one of my top three novels).  Our discussions are always enlightening but in the presence of a chalkboard, as our talk was today, this characteristic was heightened. I took a sketch from our blackboard elaborations home with me in hopes that it might yield a fine paper. We'll see.

In other news I've committed myself to presenting my first draft thesis intro within a few weeks time. I guess I had better start working on it.

Nature, Identity and Force: Cather's Alexander's Bridge

Prepare for rambling...

In our class examination of Willa Cather's first novel Alexander's Bridge (1911), I was particularly struck by the final sentence of the work (pre-epilogue). This sentence reads, "The mind that society had come to regard as a powerful and reliable machine, dedicated to its service, may for a long time have been sick within itself and bent upon its own destruction". 

What is so striking about this idea for me is the way this text, or rather my reading of this text, establishes a close relationship between scientific, mechanic and market forces in futile opposition against nature and identity. 

This final line is tremendously loaded. Following the destruction of the bridge and the death of Bartley (and many of his workers), this line seems at first glance to allude only to the death of the protagonist, but for me it is suggestive of so much more. 

Allusion to the mind suggests the scientific energy of the Professor, which is predominantly voyeuristic and taxonomic. Emblematic of the mind and connected with Psychology, the Professor seeks to document, organize, and control the natural force of human thought and behavior just as the mechanical force of Bartley's bridge building and engineering. Furthermore I think other forces are also subtly implicated such as notions of romance, and the forces of the market, which also seem to be reliable forces "in service" of society, yet act in this text to bring about destruction. 

Although by the end of the work most readers seem to regard Bartley Alexander as an unsympathetic character who has perhaps used and manipulated those around him, (as the Professor suggests, "He belonged to the people who make the play, and most of us are only onlookers at best") I think this assessment is deeply complicated by B.A.'s own sense of his lost identity.

A number of times in the text it is suggested that B.A. has progressively lost control of his identity. This suggestion is made explicit in his letter to Hilda. The text also seems to couple this loss of identity with a move away from the west where Bartley was raised. Although this loss is initially perceived as a loss of youth, or a quest to regain the energy and bliss of young love, it seems as though the reunion with Hilda is insufficient precisely because it does not allow Bartley to regress far enough, to a place where he felt he still had command of himself.  

This agency of youth seems linked to nature, the very thing that the protagonist in his maturity has worked successfully to overcome. 

I don't know...just some thoughts.