Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism

by Joan Acocella

Overview

Expanding on her absorbing and controversial 1995 New Yorker article, Joan Acocella examines the politics of Willa Cather criticism: how Cather's work has been seized upon and often distorted by critics on both the left and the right. Acocella argues that the central element of Cather's works was not a political agenda but rather a tragic vision of life. This beautifully written book makes a significant contribution to Cather studies and, at the same time, points out the follies of political criticism in the study of all literature.

A staff writer for the New Yorker, Joan Acocella is the author of Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder and Mark Morris, and the editor of The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803210462
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	02/01/2000
Pages:	127
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.81(h) x 0.65(d)
Lexile:	1180L (what's this?)

About the Author

A staff writer for the New Yorker, Joan Acocella is the author of Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder and Mark Morris, and the editor of The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky.

Read an Excerpt

In this brilliant, impassioned and controversial book, New Yorker critic Joan Acocella argues that twentieth-century literary critics from the Left and Right have misused Willa Cather and her works for their own political ends, and, in doing so, have either ignored or obscured her true literary achievement. In an acute and often very funny critique of the critics, Acocella untangles Cather's reputation from decades of politically motivated misreadings, and proposes her own clear-headed view of Cather’s genius. At once a graceful summary of Cather's life and work, and a refreshing plea that books be read for themselves, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism will also inspire readers to return to one of America's great novelists.

Table of Contents

	Author's Note	ix
	Prologue	1
1	The Darkling Plain	3
2	Youth	7
3	Cather and Her Critics: 1910s-1940s	17
4	Cather and Her Critics: 1950s-1960s	31
5	Cather and the Feminists: The Problem	37
6	Cather and the Feminists: The Solution	45
7	Politics and Criticism	67
8	The Tragic Sense of Life	77
9	Red Cloud	91
	Notes	95
	Bibliography	109
	Index	121

What People are Saying About This

Wendy Lesser

What is most astonishing is that Joan Acocella, our nation’s premier dance critic, should also be one of our sharpest literary critics. Here, in a vastly expanded version of her refreshing, astute New Yorker article, she defends Willa Cather from the willful misreadings of academic scholarship. Final score: all points to Acocella and Cather.
—(Wendy Lesser, author of The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters)

Editorial Reviews

"Beginning at this formative period in Cather's life and career (her family's move to Red Cloud), and proceeding throughout the history of her critics, in all their folly, before returning to Red Cloud in its final pages, Joan Acocella's Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism is at once a portrait of the artist and a chronicle of American literary criticism as it came into its own--often at the expense of the integrity of its subjects."—New York Times Book Review

New York Times Book Review

"Every critic of American modernism should read this book. It has more to say about the present moment in American literary criticism and about the making of literary reputation than most larger studies. It is apt in myriad ways—a little well-made book replete with sharp, well-informed distinctions, a fine sense of historical context, and a humane appreciation of those qualities that first drew readers to Cather's fiction, and despite the politics of many of her critics since, continue to do so. . . . Acocella treats Cather, her work, and her critics in an evenhanded, informed, and precise fashion. There is nothing vicious here, only good sense and a fine aesthetic sensibility, buttressed by solid scholarship conveyed in sharp prose. . . . As a study of the politics of literary reputation, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism is exceptional; as a serene appreciation of a great writer's life and work, it is poetic; as a reminder to critics of the function of criticism, it is harrowing. This book needs to be read."—American Literature

American Literature

"This slender volume is rich in content on a subject that should not even exist, and yet it does. Willa Cather should of course be read as Willa Cather, but Acocella skillfully argues that this is far from the reality of Cather criticism as it exists today. . . . A splendid study, this book goes beyond Cather to literary criticism in general. Highly recommended for upper-division undergraduates through faculty."—Choice

Choice

"Does criticism owe any fidelity to the manifest values of great authors? No one has posed that question more instructively than Joan Acocella. This shrewd, wry, and pithy book—at once a critical case history and a manifesto—should be read not only by everyone who admires Cather but also by literary academics who suspect, with good reason, that their profession has taken leave of its senses."—Frederick Crews, editor of Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend

Frederick Crews

"[An] eloquent, wholly admirable book. . . . This devastatingly concise book isn't going to win its fearless author any prizes—she marches through the ranks of Cather scholars the way Sherman marched through Georgia—but anyone who has had it up to here with political correctness should buy a copy of Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism and get ready to cheer, long and loudly. But Acocella, though she has assembled quite a nifty little chamber of critical horrors, is not your ordinary outrage-collecting cultural conservative. In fact, she is not a conservative at all, but an old-fashioned, determinedly non-radical feminist who insists that the proper goal of art is to describe life in all its proliferation, ideology-transcending complexity. . . . Far from being a purveyor of proto-identity politics, Cather was in fact an artist of extraordinary breadth, and the more I read her, the surer I am that she is not merely a woman novelist, or even an American novelist: She is a great novelist, clear-eyed and strong-hearted, who describes the harshness of the world in words of calm and consoling beauty."—Terry Teachout, National Review

National Review - Terry Teachout

"[A] sane and sometimes very funny critique of the critics."—The Economist

The Economist

"This overview of almost a century of inadequate Cather criticism concludes with the follies of feminist academics, who chide their subject for her politics, expound portentously on her 'gaps' and 'fissures,' and attempt to shove her into just the sort of sexually defined identity that she scorned throughout her life."—New Yorker

New Yorker

"So far as I know, no one in Cather studies has engaged seriously with the issues that Acocella and her reviewers raise concerning the relationship of scholarship to criticism, of literature to culture, and of English departments to literature."—Susan J. Rosowski, Resources for American Literary Study

Resources for American Literature Study - Susan J. Rosowski

"Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism is a sort of gleaming, double-edged thing: both a brisk appreciation of Cather's artistic achievement and a stern, even cutting assault on modern Cather scholarship. . . . Acocella is . . . [a] lucid, obdurate force: an intelligent outsider challenging the norms of a somewhat decadent and in-grown professional clique. She is also a marvellous, canny writer."—London Review of Books

London Review of Books

"(Acocella's book) shines with exemplary good sense. . . . When I read Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism I realized I had gloomily expected that it was virtually impossible these days to write, or to publish, so sensible a book."—New York Review of Books

New York Review of Books

"[Joan Acocella] has written a cogently argued, persuasive, and often very funny overview of the work of Willa Cather and the congeries of literary critics that have followed in her wake. . . . Acocella, a long-time admirer of Willa Cather, is a reasonable, rational critic. Her claims for this still rather underrated but surely 'major' American writer are not outsized or radical; she is gently polemical and illuminating when she writes of Cather’s meticulously crafted prose, and amusingly combative when she writes of certain of the bizarre uses which have been made of that prose in the name of political agendas. Acocella’s concern isn’t only with wilful misreadings of Willa Cather but with the purpose of criticism itself."—Times Literary Supplement

Times Literary Supplement

"This overview of almost a century of inadequate Cather criticism concludes with the follies of feminist academics, who chide their subject for her politics, expound portentously on her 'gaps' and 'fissures,' and attempt to shove her into just the sort of sexually defined identity that she scorned throughout her life."—New Yorker

New Yorker

"So far as I know, no one in Cather studies has engaged seriously with the issues that Acocella and her reviewers raise concerning the relationship of scholarship to criticism, of literature to culture, and of English departments to literature."—Susan J. Rosowski, Resources for American Literary Study

— Susan J. Rosowski

Resources for American Literature Study

"[An] eloquent, wholly admirable book. . . . This devastatingly concise book isn't going to win its fearless author any prizes—she marches through the ranks of Cather scholars the way Sherman marched through Georgia—but anyone who has had it up to here with political correctness should buy a copy of Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism and get ready to cheer, long and loudly. But Acocella, though she has assembled quite a nifty little chamber of critical horrors, is not your ordinary outrage-collecting cultural conservative. In fact, she is not a conservative at all, but an old-fashioned, determinedly non-radical feminist who insists that the proper goal of art is to describe life in all its proliferation, ideology-transcending complexity. . . . Far from being a purveyor of proto-identity politics, Cather was in fact an artist of extraordinary breadth, and the more I read her, the surer I am that she is not merely a woman novelist, or even an American novelist: She is a great novelist, clear-eyed and strong-hearted, who describes the harshness of the world in words of calm and consoling beauty."—Terry Teachout, National Review

— Terry Teachout

National Review

Expanding her 1995 essay "Cather and the Academy," New Yorker dance critic Acocella wittily charts decades of politically influenced Cather criticism and suggests an approach that balances politics with "a sustained attention to what the artist is saying." In the 1910s and early '20s, Acocella says, the author of My Antonia (1918) was considered by Mencken and others to be part of the new "antiestablishment, democratic" American fiction of poor rural people. By the 1930s, she was seen by Granville Hicks and others as a backward romantic unwilling to join the movement to "destroy and rebuild" American society. In the 1950s, Acocella continues, Cather became the "Classical/Christian Idealist." Since the 1970s, Cather has been outed as a lesbian in essays and a "dreaded psychosexual biography," allowing her to be "captured by the Left." Such politically oriented criticism, Acocella concludes, is ephemeral and limiting, yielding only "one-note criticism: all excoriation, all easy triumphs." She bemoans: "Is this the most important question we can ask artists of the past: whether their politics agree with ours?" Pointing to another method, Acocella examines patterns in Cather's life to determine her unabashedly unpolitical (and overlooked) "tragic vision" of an unfair but possibly dignified life. Acocella is pointed and funny in her analysis (on current critics: "No tree can grow, no river flow, in Cather's landscapes without this being a penis or menstrual period") and compelling in her request to move beyond politics. (Feb.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Expanding on her controversial 1995 article, Acocella makes a significant contribution to Cather studies and at the same time points out the follies of political criticism in the study of all literature. In nine chapters, she examines the politics of Willa Cather criticism, i.e. how Cather's work has been seized upon and often distorted by critics on both the left and the right. She argues that the central element of Cather's works was not a political agenda but rather a tragic vision of life. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

A first-class book, a landmark of sorts. . . . Cather emerges as what she really is, a person of great literary accomplishment, a true cultural beacon. —RWB Lewis


“She is…a marvelous, canny writer.”–Terry Castle, London Review of Books

"Acocella’s book shines with exemplary good sense. . . . She is a sure witted judge of books." A.S. Byatt, The New York
Review of Books

“As a study of the politics of literary reputation [this book] is exceptional; as a serene appreciation of a great writer's life and work, it is poetic; as a reminder to critics of a the function of criticism, it is harrowing. This book needs to be read."
—Robert Thacker, American Literature

“This devastatingly concise book isn’t going to win its fearless author any prizes — she marches through the ranks of Cather scholars the way Sherman marched through Georgia — but anyone who has had it up to here with political correctness should buy a copy . . . and get ready to cheer” — Terry Teachout, National Review

From the Publisher