Haven't had time to write about last week's reading because it inspired writing of my own related to many of the same issues and historic forces. The disappearance of the two characters at the end of Book I to me represented the disappearance of a way of life; cowboys go further west and they move to town. When Jim moves to town with his grandparents his social world expands as wide as the prairie. There is this tension that moves forward in time between country and city; rural and urban. She situates this tension in ways that reveal a form of American pastoralism.
"The disappearance of the two characters at the end of Book I to me represented the disappearance of a way of life; cowboys go further west and they move to town." Yes -- exactly right! So Otto's and Jake's disappearances are necessary here, since the locus of Jim's life shifts in keeping with the national shifts? Cowboy life didn't end by the late nineteenth century, but the frontier effectively did. It's interesting how Cather (and some of her characters) carried these origin stories with them into urban centers. Much of that happens offstage for Jim, but not for Cather's artists (Thea Kronborg or Lucy Gayheart).
Haven't had time to write about last week's reading because it inspired writing of my own related to many of the same issues and historic forces. The disappearance of the two characters at the end of Book I to me represented the disappearance of a way of life; cowboys go further west and they move to town. When Jim moves to town with his grandparents his social world expands as wide as the prairie. There is this tension that moves forward in time between country and city; rural and urban. She situates this tension in ways that reveal a form of American pastoralism.
"The disappearance of the two characters at the end of Book I to me represented the disappearance of a way of life; cowboys go further west and they move to town." Yes -- exactly right! So Otto's and Jake's disappearances are necessary here, since the locus of Jim's life shifts in keeping with the national shifts? Cowboy life didn't end by the late nineteenth century, but the frontier effectively did. It's interesting how Cather (and some of her characters) carried these origin stories with them into urban centers. Much of that happens offstage for Jim, but not for Cather's artists (Thea Kronborg or Lucy Gayheart).