TY - JOUR
AU - Murphy, Joseph C.
AB - This article re-examines Willa Cather's short story ‘A Wagner Matinée’ (1904) as a complex text steeped in European debates about Richard Wagner's music dramas as well as American discourses about the composer's role in national culture. Criticism on the story – even while examining the psychology of narrator Clark, a cultivated Bostonian who takes his Nebraska aunt to an orchestral Wagner performance – has tended to accept his fundamental premise: the opposition between Wagner's aesthetic power and Nebraska's cultural vacuity. However, this reappraisal finds a narrative more ambivalent in its characterizations and more searching in its study of Wagner's significance, in regard to such issues as gender, sexuality, anti-Semitism, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and American national identity. ‘A Wagner Matinée’ floats on the stream of Wagnerism that ran through American modernity, and the text itself evolved as it ran that course, undergoing substantial revision as Cather's understanding of Wagner, and America, matured. Cather's struggle to square the ambiguities of Wagnerism with the ruptures of American experience is compacted into the story's dissonant modernist structure.
TI - Wagnerism and American Modernism: Rereading Willa Cather's A Wagner Matine
JF - Forum for Modern Language Studies
DO - 10.1093/fmls/cqu027
DA - 2014-10-12
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/wagnerism-and-american-modernism-rereading-willa-cather-s-a-wagner-a7eslY3Wmo
SP - 405
EP - 425
VL - 50
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -