Seminar to discuss Cather's focus on creation, vanishing of cultures

Although author Willa Cather's work was widely varied in historical and geographical setting, all her books share an ethnographic commitment to how cultures are created, made permanent and transmitted to other times and places.

In the next Paul A. Olson Seminar in Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Guy Reynolds, professor of English and director of the Cather Project at UNL, will explore Cather's fictionalization of that process. Reynolds will present "Permanence and Transmission: Willa Cather's Entropology" 3:30-5 p.m. Feb. 20 at the Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q St. The seminar and a 3 p.m. reception in the museum are free and open to the public.

Reynolds will begin with a return to Cather's roots in the post-confederacy South and pioneer-era Nebraska, American places scored by "vanishings" of people and cultures. Such vanishings haunted her: hence her imagining of the cliff-dwellers or colonial-era Quebec. Compensating for such loss, Cather was drawn to repeated imaginings of a cultural gift enabling transmission and eventual cultural permanence. Reynolds will closely analyze several artifacts and places that exemplify this complex dynamic (Jim's manuscript, the skeleton of Mother Eve, Lucy Gayheart's room), while revisiting her fascination with performance (especially opera) -- the crystallization of culture as a gift, but also a moment of impermanence and vanishing.