ELIT 48C Class #12

Less versus Fewer Use fewer if you’re referring to people or things in the

plural (e.g. houses, newspapers, dogs, students, children). For example:

People these days are buying fewer newspapers. Fewer students are opting to study science-related

subjects. Fewer than thirty children each year develop the

disease.

Use less when you’re referring to something that can’t be counted or doesn’t have a plural (e.g. money, air, time, music, rain). For example:

It’s a better job but they pay me less money. People want to spend less time in traffic jams. When I’m on vacation, I listen to less music

AGENDA

• Review: – Historical Context– Style

• Discussion: Theory and Trifles• Writing about literature• Author Introduction: • Willa Cather

REVIEW

• Women’s Issues

– Birth control

– Suffrage

– Working conditions and equal pay

– Isolation

• Style

– One Act Play

– Local Color (Regionalism)

In Groups: Discuss Theoretical Applications and Manifesto

Connections to Trifles

What do you think? Criticism

• New Criticism

• Feminist Criticism

• African American (Minority) Criticism

• Lesbian, Gay, Queer Criticism

What do you think? Manifestos

• F.T Marinetti: “Manifesto of Futurism”

• Mina Loy: “Feminist Manifesto”

• Ezra Pound: “A Retrospect”

• Willa Cather: The Novel Démeublé

• William Carlos Williams: “Spring and All”

• Langston Hughes: “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”

AUTHOR INTRODUCTION: WILLA CATHER

Willa Cather

• Born in Virginia in 1873. Willa Cather spent the first decade of her life on her family's farm. In 1884, her family moved to join her father's relatives among the ethnically diverse settlers of the Great Plains. This area would serve as the inspiration for several of her novels, including My Ántonia

• Her father tried farming but soon settled the family in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Cather remembered vividly both the trauma of leaving a hill farm for a flat, empty land and the subsequent excitement of growing up in the new country. She took intense pleasure in riding her pony to neighboring farms and listening to the stories of the immigrant farm women she met there.

At sixteen, she enrolled at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Her freshman English instructor gave her essay on Thomas Carlyle to a Lincoln newspaper for publication, and by her junior year, she was supporting herself as a journalist.

From Lincoln, she moved to Pittsburgh as a magazine editor and newspaper writer. She then became a high school teacher, using summer vacations to concentrate on fiction. In 1905, she published her first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden.

In 1906, Cather was hired to edit a leading magazine and moved to New York City. Her older literary friend Sarah Orne Jewett advised her to "find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world."

Yet, she found it difficult to give up a position as a highly successful woman editor during a time when journalism was almost wholly dominated by men, and did not quit her position for three years. In 1912, on a visit to her family in Red Cloud, she stood on the edge of a wheat field and watched her first harvest in years. By then, she was emotionally ready to use her youthful memories of Nebraska. From this experience evolved O Pioneers!, the novel she preferred to think of as her first. It is this long perspective that gives Cather's work about Nebraska a rich aura of nostalgia, a poignancy also found in her next Nebraska novel, My Ántonia.

Although Cather's 1922 novel about World War I, One of Ours, was received with mixed critical reviews, it was a best seller and won Cather the Pulitzer Prize. She continued to write until physical infirmities prevented her from doing so. In 1945, she wrote that she had gotten much of what she wanted from life and had avoided the things she most violently had not wanted—too much money, noisy publicity, and the bother of meeting too many people. Willa Cather died from a massive cerebral hemorrhage on April 24, 1947.

HOMEWORK• Read My Antonia (1918) Book I Chapters 11-19• Post #12: Answer one of the following prompts

1. QHQ CHAPTERS 1-19 2. Discuss why Willa Cather chose a male narrator and why women dominate the novel.3. Explore the story or relationship of Pavel and Peter. 4. Compare and contrast the lives of Jim Burden and Antonia. Explain what drew them together and enabled them to becomeclose friends.5. Compare and contrast the relationship between Antonia and Jim in Section 1 (Chapters 1-10) and Section 2 (Chapters 11-19)