Violence, the Arts, & Cather

June 18-25, 2005

Red Cloud and Lincoln,
Nebraska

Keynote Speakers

Terry Eagleton, Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester, UK
Michéle Barale, Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College.

For more information, including the call for papers, please visit our websites: cather.unl.edu and www.willacather.org

The focus acknowledges the topicality and continued relevance of violence to discussions of literature and culture. How does an author "write" violence? Is the representation of violence fundamental to our experiences of art, as a commentator such as Girard has suggested? Is there something "new" in the twentieth-century's experience of violence? And can we identify specifically American encounters with violence--in terms of representation, mythologies, and narratives? And what does it mean to write about violence as a female author?

Cather has always been implicated and engaged with these debates, ever since Hemingway castigated her portrayal of the Great War battlefields. We enourage participants to think widely and laterally about the topic, however, and to think about the myriad forms in which Cather explores (and sometimes fails to explore) violence and its effects. Violence can be deployed in metaphorical and suggestive ways, as well as taking us back to Cather's war novel. Participants might well want to address the violence of dispossession, the violence implicit in acts of discovery and collecting, or the emotional violence of neglect or misrecognition.