Racked or

Wracked?

SPELLING ERROR:

CONFUSING “RACKED” WITH “WRACKED.”

If you are racked with nerves, you are feeling as if you are being stretched on the torture device, the rack. You rack your brain when you try to write difficult stories.

Wrack, on the other hand, has to do with ruinous accidents. With luck, this won’t apply to your writing, but it might just apply to the stock market, which has been wracked by recession.

AGENDA

New Teams

Lecture:

oMy Antonia Book I

oHistorical Context

Discussion

oQHQs

o Prompts

CHOOSE NEW TEAMS

1. The teams will change on or near essay due dates.

2. You must change at least 50% of your team after each project is completed.

3. You may never be on a team with the same person more than twice.

4. You may never have a new team composed of more than 50% of any prior team.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT: IMMIGRATION

Up until 1825, fewer than 10,000 new immigrants came to the United States each year. By the late 1840s, revolutions in Europe and the devastating potato famine in Ireland sent people to this country by the hundreds of thousands. By 1860, one-eighth of America's 32 million people were foreign born.

While many of these immigrants settled in the east, the promotional activities of the railroads brought many immigrants straight to the prairies. The railroad companies even sent scouts abroad to encourage people to come and settle the plains and prairies.

Another flood of immigrants came in the 1860s and 1870s, just after the Homestead Act of 1862. This legislation granted, for a small fee, 160 acres of Western public land to citizens or prospective citizens who would stay and settle it for five years. These settlers were predominantly from western and northern Europe.

By the time Cather was writing My Ántonia, immigration to the Great

Plains had slowed. Urban immigration, however, continued to cause

miserable situations in the cities.

As a journalist in Pittsburgh and New York City and as a

newspaperwoman and editor for a radical magazine, Cather was

exposed to the conditions in which many urban immigrants lived.

She also saw the mounting fear that the arrival of cheap foreign

labor was not only undesirable competition but a contribution to

the widening and hardening gap between rich and poor.

During World War I, German-Americans were definitely

suspect and stories of their victimization can be found in almost any

Midwestern state histories. Even the Czechs, who were eager to help

free their homeland from the domination of Austria-Hungary, suffered

during the war years. The country's anxiety over the role immigrants

were to play in our society did not ease, even though the "tide" of

immigration was stemmed briefly by World War I.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT:

THEORIES OF AMERICANIZATION

Reaction to the massive European immigration of the nineteenth century had

fostered opposing theories of Americanization: These models have come to be

called the "melting pot" theory and the "salad bowl" theory and

still define the debate on difference even today, almost a century later.

In the 1890s, Frederick Jackson Turner popularized the image of

the American West as a crucible (a vat or vessel) where European

immigrants would be "Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race."

My Ántonia can be read as a tribute to this view and Ántonia

herself can be appreciated as "the rich mine of life, like the founders of early

races" that produces the American people from the raw material that has been

gathered on its shores.

Carl Degler coined the expression "salad bowl."

Spend 10 minutes in

your groups, discussing

your answers to

prompts or your QHQs

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1.Discuss why Willa Cather

chose a male narrator and

why women dominate the

novel.

2. Explore the story or relationship of Pavel and Peter.

a. Q: What is Pavel and Peter’s relationship? Is the story about wolves and bride convincing?

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

3. Compare and contrast the lives of

Jim Burden and Antonia. Explain

what drew them together and

enabled them to become close

friends.

a. How have the early deaths of Jim’s

parents, or the circumstances

thereof, affected Jim’s personality?

4. Compare and contrast the

relationship between Antonia and

Jim in Section 1 (Chapters 1-10)

and Section 2 (Chapters 11-19)

A. Why is Jim infatuated or in awe of Antonia?

What makes her desirable?

QHQ: CHAPTERS 1-19

QUEER THEORY?

1.Q: Is Jim supposed to be Cather?

a. Q: So can Cather be both Jim and

Antonia?

2.Q: Should Willa Cather’s refusal to

conform to a traditional gender role

influence our reading of My Antonia?

3.Q: Does Jim Burden play a feminine

identity in the novel?

1. Q: How do the Burdens and Fuchs, and the

Shimerdas behave and react towards one

another’s cultural and ethnic backgrounds?

2. Q: Why did the Shimerdas become more hostile

and started to feel more superior towards the

Americans?

3. Q: Was the death of Mr. Shimerda a symbol for

cultural difference?

6. Discuss the importance of

the narrator leaving Black

Hawk for college life.

7. Discuss My Antonia in terms

of one or more of the

Manifestos.

8. Write your own QHQ

Read My Antonia (1918) Book II and Book III

Post #8: Choose One

1. Discuss the contrasts that are developing between the

characters in this section.

2. Discuss the importance of independent women in section II.

3. Discuss the differences between the country and town girls.

4. Explain the importance of the dance pavilion to both Jim and

Antonia.

5. Explain why Willa Cather has chosen to devote one of the

books of her novel to Lena Lingard.