Article published In: Keeping Ourselves Alive
[Journal of Narrative and Life History 3:2/3] 1993
► pp. 299–318
Figuring Culture and Literacy in Willa Cather's "Paul's Case"
Published online: 4 August 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/jnlh.3.2-3.13fig
https://doi.org/10.1075/jnlh.3.2-3.13fig
Abstract
Literacy, both as a theme and as a narrative structuring device, marks much literature and takes on specific shapes and forms, depending on its relationship to its generic and historical contexts. Set in Pittsburgh, Willa Cather's "Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament" (1905/1983) features the steel world of indus-trialists and laborers, the world of monied capitalists (Carnegie, Mellon, West-inghouse, and Heinz) and of workers aspiring to middle-class safety or, in their daydreams, to the wealth of an employer like Carnegie, who began as one of them and who advanced, as he claims in his autobiographical accounts, in part through literacy. By studying Cather's short story, we can learn how literacy shapes construction of character in fiction and biography as well as construc-tion of persona in autobiographical material. That is, we can learn the integral role that figurations of literacy play in literary narratives. (Literary criticism, dialogic approach and biographical criticism; composition and literacy studies)
Dreams are neither ideologically neutral nor politically innocent. (Giroux, 1990)
References (30)
Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics (C. Emerson, Ed. & Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bobinski, G. S. (1969). Carnegie libraries: Their history and impact on American public library development. Chicago: American Libarary Association.
Brown, E. K. (1987). Willa Cather: A critical biography (with L. Edel). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. (Original work published 1953)
Carpenter, D. A. (1987). Why Willa Cather revised "Paul's case": The work in art and those Sunday afternoons. American Literature, 591, 590–608.
Cather, W. (1970). The world and the parish: Willa Cather's articles and reviews, 1893-1902 (Vols. 1 & 21, W. M. Curtin, Ed.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
(1983). Paul's case: A study in temperament. In J. Woodress (Ed.), The troll garden (pp. 102–121). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. (Original work published 1905)
(1983). The sculptor's funeral. In J. Woodress (Ed.), The troll garden (pp. 32–45). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. (Original work published 1905)
(1987). The professor's commencement. In S. O'Brien (Ed.), 24 stories (pp. 131–142). New York: Signet. (Original story published 1902)
Daniell, B. (1990). The situation of literacy and cognition: What we can learn from the Uzbek experiment. In A. A. Lunsford, H. Moglen, & J. Slevin (Eds.), The right to literacy (pp. 197–207). New York: Modern Language Association.
Eldred, J. C. (1991). Narratives of socialization: Literacy in the short story. College English, 531, 686–700.
Emerson, C. (1986). The outer word and inner speech: Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and the internalization of language. In G. S. Morson (Ed.), Bakhtin: Essays and dialogues on his work (pp. 21–40). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Emerson, C., & Morson, G. S. (1987). Penultimate words. In C. Koelb & V. Lokke (Eds.), The current in criticism (pp. 43–65). West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.
Giroux, H. A. (1990). Liberal arts education and the struggle for public life: Dreaming about democracy. South Atlantic Quarterly, 891, 113–138.
Graff, H. J. (1981). Literacy, jobs, and industrialization: The nineteenth century. In H. J. Graff (Ed.), Literacy and social development in the West: A reader (pp. 232–260). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
(1987). "Pauperism, misery, and vice": Illiteracy and criminality in the nineteenth century. In Labyrinths of literacy: Reflections on literacy past and present (pp. 187–213). London: Falmer.
Hirschkop, K. (1989). Introduction: Bakhtin and cultural theory. In K. Hirschkop & D. Shepherd (Eds.), Bakhtin and cultural theory (pp. 1–38). Manchester, England: Manchester University Press.
Kaestle, C. F., Damon-Moore, H., Stedman, L. C., Tinsley, K., & Trollinger, W. V., Jr. (1991). Literacy in the United States: Readers and reading since 1886. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Pechey, G. (1989). On the borders of Bakhtin: Dialogisation, decolonisation. In K. Hirschkop & D. Shepherd (Eds.), Bakhtin and cultural theory (pp. 39–67). Manchester, England: Manchester University Press.
Phelan, J. (1984). Thematic reference, literary structure, and fictive character: An examination of interrelationships. Semiotics, 481, 345–365.
(1989). Discourse, character, and ideology. In J. Phelan, (Ed.), Reading narrative: Form, ethics, ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Porter, K. A. (1952). Afterword: Some reflections on Willa Cather. In W. Cather, The troll garden (pp. 139–150). New York: NAL Penguin.
Prentice, A., & Theobald, M. R. (1991). The historiography of women teachers: A retrospect. In A. Prentice & M. R. Theobald (Eds.), Women who taught: Perspectives on the history of women and teaching (pp. 3–33). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.