"Willa Cather's Flatness"
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Downtown Conference Center
161 West Wisconsin Avenue
Room 7820
Milwaukee, WI
United States
This event, part of the 19th International Willa Cather Seminar, is free and open to the public.
In this talk, Masud will consider what the flatness of the prairie—or, more precisely, the imagined flatness of the prairie—makes possible for Willa Cather and her characters. She suggests that, in Cather's hands, topographical flatness makes available a phenomenon of memory - something between presque vu and deja vu - which creates a disruption of relationships between self and other. This disruption, counter-intuitively, affords Cather and her characters new affective and relational possibilities.
The views expressed in international seminar programs do not necessarily reflect the views of the Willa Cather Foundation.
Noreen Masud
Noreen Masud is a lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her research covers all kinds of bases: flatness, spivs, puppets, leftovers, earworms, footnotes, rhymes, hymns, surprises, folk songs, colours, superstitions. While Masud works mostly on twentieth-century literature, she also makes forays into Victorian and Romantic literature. Her upcoming book, Flat Landscapes in Twentieth-Century Literature, focuses on D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein. Portions of the manuscript have been published in Textual Practice and Twentieth-Century Literature.