Introduction to Literary Nebraska | Guy Reynolds

Department of English Author

11/23/2020 Added

244 Plays

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In "Nebraskan Realisms: Life and Fiction, Document and Invention," Professor Guy Reynolds introduces the Literary Nebraska series.

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[00:00:00.359](soft music)
[00:00:05.810]Hello everybody.
[00:00:07.000]My name is Guy Reynolds
[00:00:08.310]and I'm a professor of English at the,
[00:00:11.360]in the department of English,
[00:00:12.970]University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
[00:00:14.910]And it's my pleasure to introduce a series of lectures
[00:00:19.070]about Literary Nebraska.
[00:00:21.150]About the writers, authors, poets,
[00:00:24.420]comic book artists, autobiographers, memoirists
[00:00:27.800]that have helped to shape the very rich and complex history
[00:00:32.120]of literature in this great state of Nebraska.
[00:00:35.620]So what I'm gonna do today
[00:00:36.590]is to introduce the course to you
[00:00:38.500]and to introduce Nebraska to you,
[00:00:40.307]and to introduce some of the writers of Nebraska to you.
[00:00:43.950]I'm gonna do I think, three or four things.
[00:00:45.970]I'm gonna talk a little bit about
[00:00:47.060]the history of the state at the beginning,
[00:00:49.140]so we know where we stand.
[00:00:50.910]I'm gonna talk a little bit about
[00:00:52.740]the relationship of the department of English
[00:00:54.950]to this particular course.
[00:00:56.950]And then I'm gonna introduce some of the authors
[00:00:59.430]that we're gonna be studying,
[00:01:01.130]and that I hope that you will grow to enjoy,
[00:01:04.620]to admire, to love in the way that I have grown
[00:01:10.140]to admire those authors.
[00:01:12.240]As you can tell from my accent, I'm not from Nebraska
[00:01:15.440]or from the state of Nebraska or the Midwest,
[00:01:17.520]or even from the United States.
[00:01:18.740]I'm from Britain, from Manchester in England,
[00:01:22.195]but I have a connection with Nebraska
[00:01:24.350]because of the work of Willa Cather.
[00:01:26.040]I wrote my PhD on Willa Cather
[00:01:28.910]quite a long time ago now.
[00:01:30.460]And then later on in my career,
[00:01:31.930]I was offered the chance to come and work here
[00:01:34.090]at the University of Nebraska
[00:01:35.950]as an editor, a scholar and a teacher,
[00:01:39.190]particularly focusing on the work of Willa Cather,
[00:01:41.630]perhaps Nebraska's best known writer.
[00:01:44.750]That's something for you to think about
[00:01:46.960]and for us to discuss.
[00:01:49.730]And I'll talk a little bit about Willa Cather later on
[00:01:51.710]and introduce her work as well.
[00:01:53.490]Later on in this particular lecture series,
[00:01:55.850]my colleague, Melissa Homestead,
[00:01:57.730]also a Cather scholar will be talking about Willa's work.
[00:02:02.110]But my job today is to give you a kind of
[00:02:05.858]a broad picture, panorama, if you like,
[00:02:08.060]and an introduction to the particular topic at hand,
[00:02:11.530]Literary Nebraska.
[00:02:13.840]Well, the state was founded in 1867,
[00:02:16.197]and the university was founded two years later in 1869.
[00:02:20.700]And in a sense, our story begins then.
[00:02:24.260]I'll talk a little bit about
[00:02:25.440]some of the deeper history of Nebraska later on
[00:02:27.610]and what that might mean to us,
[00:02:29.360]but essentially we're kind of beginning to roll our story on
[00:02:32.430]from that particular moment.
[00:02:35.050]This was a very raw quote unquote "empty"
[00:02:39.550]though it was not empty, terrain in the 1860s.
[00:02:43.260]And following the development of the railroads
[00:02:45.520]and the push of the railroads through into the heartlands,
[00:02:49.240]as we would now call a move of the Midwest,
[00:02:52.000]Nebraska began to be settled.
[00:02:54.430]The civil war had finished just a few years earlier,
[00:02:57.750]Nebraska of course had played an important role
[00:03:00.863]in that particular conflict through the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
[00:03:05.910]Now it was to be quote, "settled"
[00:03:09.157]and created as a state.
[00:03:12.490]And the railroads are gonna be something
[00:03:14.410]that you will come across probably again and again,
[00:03:16.730]as you're reading and thinking about Nebraska.
[00:03:20.490]As you'll see,
[00:03:21.323]and I'll be gonna be showing some images
[00:03:22.640]during this talk,
[00:03:24.070]the state of Nebraska remains in many ways, very similar
[00:03:27.180]to the place that it was in the late 19th century,
[00:03:31.070]in terms of the basic logistics and communications
[00:03:34.410]within the state.
[00:03:36.070]IAT, following that long, flat path across the state
[00:03:41.230]follows the trajectories of many of the railroads
[00:03:44.740]that were laid down during those decades,
[00:03:46.750]at the end of the 19th century.
[00:03:48.860]The small towns that you see followed those railroads
[00:03:52.680]was placed at certain intervals
[00:03:55.470]in order to help the development of agriculture
[00:03:57.970]and cattle farming at that time.
[00:04:00.330]Two large towns were already being established,
[00:04:02.720]Lincoln, where I'm talking to you from and Omaha.
[00:04:08.392]And some of the early responses of writers to the state
[00:04:12.610]remain common to writers today, I think.
[00:04:16.030]First of all, the sheer size of Nebraska
[00:04:18.610]at around 90,000 square miles,
[00:04:20.830]same as my own country, the United Kingdom,
[00:04:24.200]it's a country sized entity, the state of Nebraska.
[00:04:30.544]The remarkable difference in fact
[00:04:32.040]of terrain within Nebraska,
[00:04:34.150]although people flashing through on (mumbles)
[00:04:36.790]flying above it,
[00:04:38.120]flying across what they call flyover territory,
[00:04:40.450]would tend to think sometimes of Nebraska,
[00:04:42.760]as a uniform place, this isn't true.
[00:04:45.530]There are great differences in terrain and landscape
[00:04:48.430]between the Sand Hills, say in the west,
[00:04:51.820]even dry a ranching country out towards Wyoming,
[00:04:55.210]the Lusher farmland closer to Iowa
[00:04:57.720]in the eastern part of the state.
[00:04:59.330]And then the fertile valleys
[00:05:01.070]running along the boundary with Kansas
[00:05:03.310]along the Republican valley,
[00:05:05.400]places like Red Cloud, Nebraska, where Cather grew up.
[00:05:08.860]So this is all part of the terrain of Nebraska,
[00:05:11.270]which the writers that we're gonna look at,
[00:05:13.330]partly respond to.
[00:05:14.900]Trying to map a place, which is extraordinarily big,
[00:05:18.580]extraordinarily diverse
[00:05:20.290]in terms of geography, geology, space,
[00:05:23.120]but also quote unquote "empty".
[00:05:26.120]And I'm gonna talk a little bit to you as well about
[00:05:28.740]the population of Nebraska
[00:05:30.820]and how it's changed over the years.
[00:05:33.500]This is the West.
[00:05:35.530]The idea of what the American west might be
[00:05:38.220]is also integral to the writing of Nebraska.
[00:05:41.800]To the west of the state of Nebraska,
[00:05:43.380]you have Denver, Colorado,
[00:05:46.210]to the south of coarse, Kansas,
[00:05:47.920]and then the Northern Plains above us.
[00:05:49.360]We are in a way in a heartland of a particular place
[00:05:54.210]in the West where the Midwest meets the Great Plains
[00:05:57.610]where the very cold, empty Northern Plains
[00:06:00.300]meet the slightly more populated southern parts
[00:06:04.240]of the Great Plains, Kansas, and then Oklahoma.
[00:06:07.430]And Jack Kerouac's on the road
[00:06:10.010]as the beatniks travel west
[00:06:12.740]it's in Omaha, that they first see somebody
[00:06:15.080]wearing a cowboy hat.
[00:06:16.940]And for Kerouac and some of the other beatniks,
[00:06:20.250]including for instance,
[00:06:21.083]William Burroughs travel through Nebraska,
[00:06:23.610]Allen Ginsberg too,
[00:06:25.340]who traveled through Nebraska quite regularly
[00:06:27.820]by motorbike and by car in the 1950s and 1960s.
[00:06:31.650]This is one of the kind of junction places
[00:06:34.670]where one part of the United States gives way to another.
[00:06:38.650]And that sense of transition I think,
[00:06:40.310]is a theme that you might find coming up
[00:06:43.060]in some of the things that you're about to read.
[00:06:46.100]We're also connected to cities,
[00:06:48.390]to Denver in the west and to Chicago, Illinois,
[00:06:52.585]to the northeast of where we are at the moment.
[00:06:55.550]And the agricultural economy of Nebraska
[00:06:59.077]and the broader Great Plains grew up around
[00:07:01.300]a hub and spoke system with cattle being taken by rail,
[00:07:08.010]up to Chicago, where they will be slaughtered
[00:07:11.180]in the great slaughter houses
[00:07:12.640]and meat processing factories of Chicago
[00:07:15.810]in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
[00:07:18.960]A kind of agricultural economy,
[00:07:21.060]which was then replaced by refrigeration.
[00:07:23.600]But which left this kind of hub and spoke system,
[00:07:26.690]connecting the city by railroad to Chicago.
[00:07:31.660]Even as recently as the 1950s and early 60s,
[00:07:34.875]it was possible to travel by train up to Chicago,
[00:07:39.170]to work there for a couple of days,
[00:07:41.160]staying in a hotel overnight,
[00:07:42.800]and then to catch a train back, say early on Wednesday,
[00:07:45.580]and be back in your office on, you know,
[00:07:48.360]early on a Wednesday morning.
[00:07:49.650]There was a kind of commuting that took place,
[00:07:52.080]and that features in some of the novels of Willa Cather
[00:07:54.830]that we're gonna look at.
[00:07:57.070]So what about the people of Nebraska?
[00:07:58.810]This is gonna be one of the topics
[00:08:00.980]that many of the lectures and the texts that you look at
[00:08:04.890]concern themselves with.
[00:08:06.830]We might think of three particular groups of people,
[00:08:10.980]or in a way, ideas of what people might be and might become,
[00:08:15.070]are shaping some of the literature of Nebraska.
[00:08:18.490]First of all, what we sometimes call the Vanishing American,
[00:08:22.570]which is a kind of ironic term, you might say
[00:08:26.940]for the native Americans who once, who lives here
[00:08:29.690]for possibly as long as 10,000 years
[00:08:32.720]in a kind of very unique nomadic society,
[00:08:35.590]the Lakota Sioux, primarily in this area
[00:08:39.410]and Oglala Sioux as well.
[00:08:41.240]And their presence or their lack of presence in literature
[00:08:45.760]is something that we need to think about
[00:08:47.930]throughout the course.
[00:08:50.210]Notoriously, many of Nebraska's writers, European Americans,
[00:08:55.860]Cather would be an example of this
[00:08:57.770]have failed to recognize,
[00:08:59.520]have failed to recognize adequately
[00:09:01.540]the presence of that culture and those peoples.
[00:09:04.870]And later on in the course, you will be studying
[00:09:06.470]Black Elk Speaks, which is a key text
[00:09:08.630]because it brings into play some of the rich culture
[00:09:12.600]and the inherited world of those peoples
[00:09:15.230]via the figure of Black Elk.
[00:09:19.090]The Plains Indians seem to writers like Willa Cather
[00:09:23.360]to be barely present, to be just recognized as she says,
[00:09:27.380]in one image in one of her novels,
[00:09:29.280]as a kind of trampling down of grass on the prairie.
[00:09:32.940]Which is a particular kind of haunting image
[00:09:35.220]of something, which is, a people or a culture,
[00:09:37.430]which is barely present to those viewers.
[00:09:41.760]Black Elk Speaks is an important text for us
[00:09:43.750]because it's an account of a major Lakota figure
[00:09:46.760]and a history of a people and a history of a nation.
[00:09:49.710]And it also introduces the idea of autobiography or memoir,
[00:09:53.570]which again is gonna be one of the themes
[00:09:55.140]that we're gonna be looking at during this course.
[00:09:58.190]Black Elk Speaks also raises interesting questions about
[00:10:00.790]how we document, how we record sensitive merged
[00:10:04.970]Black Elk contact
[00:10:06.540]with the UNL English professor, John Neihardt,
[00:10:09.510]who acted as a kind of researcher,
[00:10:11.510]an interlocutor, an interviewer,
[00:10:14.290]an amateur anthropologist,
[00:10:16.070]folklorist in his conversations with Black Elk.
[00:10:21.890]So that's the first thing that we might think about
[00:10:23.580]when we look at the state of Nebraska
[00:10:26.037]and the peoples who have lived here.
[00:10:29.540]We also have to concern ourselves with immigration.
[00:10:33.672]The state of Nebraska and its history is often
[00:10:36.010]thought of in terms of the waves of white immigration,
[00:10:39.840]European immigration, transatlantic immigration
[00:10:42.720]to the state,
[00:10:43.950]particularly during the last decades of the 19th century,
[00:10:48.290]and then into the early decades of the 20th century.
[00:10:50.860]Germans, Bohemian, Scandinavians,
[00:10:53.230]who moved to the state in the 1890s, 1900s,
[00:10:56.550]and through, into the 1910s.
[00:10:58.640]This is when America, the United States of America
[00:11:01.710]is reshaped by waves of immigration,
[00:11:04.750]which far exceed in terms of population,
[00:11:07.660]a proportion of population,
[00:11:09.230]anything that we've seen since.
[00:11:11.800]And America is changed radically during the 1890s
[00:11:14.670]through really, to the early 1920s,
[00:11:18.800]particularly in 1924, when there's a significant
[00:11:21.360]change in legislation surrounding immigration
[00:11:24.870]into the United States.
[00:11:27.370]Willa Cather who again, I'm gonna be talking to you
[00:11:29.730]quite a bit about.
[00:11:31.230]Wrote an essay called
[00:11:32.063]Nebraska, The End of the First Cycle
[00:11:34.540]published in 1923.
[00:11:36.410]And in that essay, she noted that in 1910,
[00:11:39.340]there were 900,000 foreign born Nebraskans.
[00:11:42.757]And the total population at that time
[00:11:45.010]was a mere 1,192,000.
[00:11:49.710]So the early population of the state
[00:11:52.410]in the decades following the foundation of the university
[00:11:55.520]whereas Cather put it, largely transatlantic.
[00:11:58.820]And again, if you think about that ratio,
[00:12:01.670]900,000 foreign born to a total population
[00:12:06.330]of just under 1.2 million,
[00:12:08.550]you can see that two thirds of the population
[00:12:11.090]of the state of Nebraska in 1910
[00:12:13.620]had not been born in the United States.
[00:12:16.510]And that makes a very, very big difference, I think,
[00:12:19.700]to the ways in which we might think about
[00:12:21.650]immigration debates today,
[00:12:23.100]if we have that long perspective on what's already happened,
[00:12:26.100]what's already occurred where we're currently living.
[00:12:29.540]Cather tells anecdotes in that story
[00:12:31.730]of wandering through small towns in Nebraska,
[00:12:35.940]such as Waldron, Nebraska,
[00:12:37.130]still famous as a kind of check town,
[00:12:39.750]and not being able to hear English spoken,
[00:12:43.100]when Cather grew up in Webster County, Nebraska
[00:12:46.700]Red Cloud, being the particular small town
[00:12:50.040]that she was raised in having moved here
[00:12:52.760]from Virginia as a small girl,
[00:12:55.020]she describes encountering in churches
[00:12:58.570]and in social meetings,
[00:12:59.740]people who spoke Swedish, Danish, French,
[00:13:02.740]and having a kind of cosmopolitan upbringing
[00:13:06.280]by virtue of all the immigrants who surrounded her
[00:13:08.530]in that particular small town
[00:13:12.980]down there on the Kansas border.
[00:13:16.230]In this sense, the state, really is a creation
[00:13:18.690]of relatively recent immigration around a hundred years ago.
[00:13:24.470]And yet that story is carried on
[00:13:25.810]and it's important to recognize
[00:13:27.330]that having had that period between 1890, 1910,
[00:13:31.370]then there is a period when the population
[00:13:33.510]is in some ways relatively
[00:13:37.140]static in terms of its composition
[00:13:38.920]until the mid 1960s, when legislation again,
[00:13:42.370]changes surrounding immigration into the United States.
[00:13:45.410]Some of the quotas that have been put in place
[00:13:47.370]regarding taking more European,
[00:13:50.100]Northwest European immigrants,
[00:13:52.390]policy changes that have been made in the 1920s
[00:13:55.280]was struck down in the mid 1960s
[00:13:57.270]as part of Lyndon Johnson, civil rights program.
[00:14:00.400]And after that immigration into the United States
[00:14:03.420]becomes less Eurocentric
[00:14:05.730]and it begins to incorporate peoples from Africa,
[00:14:08.610]from Latin America.
[00:14:09.850]And we see all of those kinds of changes
[00:14:13.530]then impacting a state like Nebraska.
[00:14:17.120]And one book that I would recommend to you,
[00:14:20.110]which is not a think, one of our primary texts,
[00:14:22.960]but you still well worth looking at
[00:14:25.000]is a book by the local activist,
[00:14:29.770]psychologist, therapist and writer, Mary Pipher,
[00:14:33.710]P-I-P-H-E-R, called The Middle of Everywhere.
[00:14:36.980]Helping refugees create the American community,
[00:14:40.510]a book published in 2003.
[00:14:42.830]And that centered on Lincoln, Nebraska.
[00:14:45.210]And you can hear in the title, a kind of ironic reference
[00:14:49.130]to the fact that people might live
[00:14:51.070]or think of Lincoln, Nebraska was the middle of nowhere,
[00:14:54.020]but as Mary says in that book is the middle of everywhere.
[00:14:57.100]And Lincoln and Omaha in particular,
[00:14:59.300]have been radically shaped and reshaped
[00:15:01.630]by waves of immigration and changes in refugee policy,
[00:15:04.640]and in particular, during the last 20 years,
[00:15:07.070]we have substantial Vietnamese communities
[00:15:09.750]in Lincoln and Omaha.
[00:15:11.320]We have a Sudanese population in Omaha,
[00:15:14.820]which is, I think one of the largest in the United States.
[00:15:17.900]And the university itself has changed in the years
[00:15:21.420]that I've worked here since 2003
[00:15:23.860]to become a more cosmopolitan place,
[00:15:25.900]partly reflecting the fact that a native born Nebraskan
[00:15:30.310]or first generation or second generation Nebraskan now
[00:15:33.770]might come from some very, very different places
[00:15:38.210]to those places,
[00:15:39.980]might have family origins, let's get it correct,
[00:15:42.080]that are very, very different to the kind of family origins
[00:15:44.010]that we will be looking at, 50 or a hundred years ago.
[00:15:47.860]And I think this is an important and significant detail
[00:15:51.750]of the social history that you might want to think about.
[00:15:55.910]So why Nebraska in terms of literature
[00:15:57.810]and why the university of Nebraska, Lincoln
[00:15:59.810]in terms of thinking about
[00:16:01.630]a topics such as the Literary Nebraska?
[00:16:04.920]Well, the university is central to the state,
[00:16:07.130]its foundation in 1869,
[00:16:09.110]coming immediately after the statehood of Nebraska in 1867
[00:16:14.210]is very, very significant.
[00:16:15.700]And again, I'll be showing you,
[00:16:17.130]you will see behind me some photographs of Nebraska,
[00:16:21.480]of the campus from the early days of the university.
[00:16:24.270]You can see how relatively substantial,
[00:16:27.200]grandiose even the buildings are.
[00:16:29.530]Especially if we think about
[00:16:30.560]the kind of rather raw frontier towns
[00:16:33.150]that had sprung up around the state.
[00:16:37.630]The position of Lincoln as the state capital,
[00:16:41.210]it's significance is a bureaucratic center
[00:16:43.820]as an administrative center, as a political center,
[00:16:46.770]and as a cultural center
[00:16:48.330]is partly in embodied in the campus
[00:16:51.230]with the, you know, red brick buildings
[00:16:53.610]that you start to see in the 1890s.
[00:16:55.850]University is still when Willa Cather is here
[00:16:58.530]in 1890 is quite small.
[00:17:00.650]2,000 students compared to the over 20,000 undergraduates
[00:17:05.110]and 4,000 or so graduate students that we now have.
[00:17:09.050]The campus was further west, it was still,
[00:17:14.050]it was ringed by a blue fence.
[00:17:16.320]And students would have been,
[00:17:18.030]would have had to observe curfew
[00:17:19.330]and be in their dorms and on-campus
[00:17:22.760]by I think it was 11 o'clock at night.
[00:17:24.800]The town itself was around probably around 30,000 people
[00:17:28.720]in the 1890s, 1900, quite small.
[00:17:31.980]But you can see that the university would have played
[00:17:34.150]a big role within that particular society.
[00:17:39.430]The study of literature and the production of literature,
[00:17:42.390]and I use both of those terms quite deliberately.
[00:17:44.950]The study of literature and the production of literature
[00:17:48.250]are both activities that have been very central
[00:17:51.260]to the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
[00:17:53.390]Particularly of course, within the English department.
[00:17:56.380]It is striking how many of the people
[00:17:58.960]that you are going to be studying
[00:18:00.970]were also, and are also professors
[00:18:03.690]within this particular department.
[00:18:06.210]Willa Cather was a student here, one of our finest students,
[00:18:10.670]John Neihardt was a professor of poetry
[00:18:13.730]within the department of English.
[00:18:15.670]Ted Kooser is of course a professor of poetry
[00:18:19.150]within the department of English.
[00:18:20.680]Jennine Crucet one of our contemporary writers,
[00:18:23.640]again teaching here.
[00:18:25.670]And some of the people who are gonna be lecturing to you,
[00:18:28.520]Joe Castro, Hope Wabuke, Ted, Kwame Dawes,
[00:18:33.480]are all, as well as commentators on literature and scholars
[00:18:36.890]also formidable writers themselves.
[00:18:39.800]One of the things that's quite unique about
[00:18:42.110]the UNL English department is that
[00:18:44.190]it contains creative writers within the department,
[00:18:47.120]as part of the English department.
[00:18:49.010]In some other departments, Iowa would be an example,
[00:18:52.260]creative writing occupies a slightly
[00:18:54.030]it's a different space, different department,
[00:18:56.100]different entity.
[00:18:58.310]Creative writing is very much part of
[00:19:00.560]what the English department here is about.
[00:19:03.550]And in fact has always been about,
[00:19:05.910]and that gives it a kind of creative vitality, I think,
[00:19:09.290]which is important.
[00:19:10.290]So the people who are gonna be talking to you
[00:19:12.520]about scholars and commentators on literature,
[00:19:14.780]but also producers of literature.
[00:19:17.270]And I think that's a very, very significant.
[00:19:20.750]We are also though, this is a course that's being designed
[00:19:25.610]for online teaching.
[00:19:28.020]It's also worth stressing the kind of practical
[00:19:32.580]physical aspects of what we do.
[00:19:35.770]And if you have a chance to explore
[00:19:39.640]some of the literary archives
[00:19:42.410]at the university, I would encourage you to do so.
[00:19:45.560]Many of them can be,
[00:19:46.570]some of those
[00:19:48.040]many of those materials, lets get it right.
[00:19:49.380]Many of those materials can now be looked at online
[00:19:52.660]and here again, I'm gonna mention Willa Cather,
[00:19:54.800]the Cather Archive, which is easily accessible.
[00:19:58.150]Cather Archive that you've got,
[00:20:01.672]is an entity edited by Carter scholar, Andrew Jewell,
[00:20:06.780]out of the library at the university
[00:20:09.460]and contains hundreds of letters,
[00:20:11.310]many documents, great deal of scholarship, photographs
[00:20:14.920]of Willa Cather and the world that she lived in,
[00:20:17.020]all of this can be explored.
[00:20:18.720]And of course, we also have that physical archive,
[00:20:21.360]which sits behind this with the collections of manuscripts,
[00:20:25.150]collections of letters,
[00:20:28.050]artifacts relating to Willa Cather's life,
[00:20:30.030]medals for instance, that she won.
[00:20:32.700]All of this is open to you.
[00:20:35.170]This is a public forum, a public university
[00:20:38.730]and all of those things can easily be explored
[00:20:41.220]simply by going to the library,
[00:20:43.280]making an appointment and going to look around the archive.
[00:20:45.610]And people will be very pleased to show you
[00:20:48.200]what we've got, the librarians there.
[00:20:50.530]So I do wanna stress that particular connection as well.
[00:20:53.700]I think that's extremely important,
[00:20:55.680]very, very significant within what we're looking at.
[00:20:59.140]So let's talk a little bit about the course itself.
[00:21:02.450]I've given you a sense of the state of Nebraska,
[00:21:06.380]how it grew,
[00:21:08.150]some of the key features of what the landscape
[00:21:13.070]and the people of Nebraska, you know,
[00:21:15.160]the society, what those things might signify for you.
[00:21:18.660]Now, I want to give you a sense of like
[00:21:19.803]what this course is gonna be about.
[00:21:21.720]And this is just a very basic kind of preview
[00:21:24.240]so that you get a sense of the terrain that is opening up,
[00:21:31.250]I hope for you, and which will draw you in.
[00:21:35.320]One of the things that I find
[00:21:36.310]very exciting about this course
[00:21:37.840]and being a scholar and a reader
[00:21:41.000]interested in the literature of Nebraska,
[00:21:43.740]one of the things that really fascinates me about this
[00:21:46.820]are the very different literary forms,
[00:21:50.210]the very different literary genres
[00:21:53.080]that you and I have a chance to read and explore.
[00:21:59.740]I've already mentioned Black Elk earlier on,
[00:22:02.870]and it's important to recognize
[00:22:05.870]the significance of autobiography and memoir
[00:22:10.060]in the writing of Literary Nebraska.
[00:22:13.890]The first part of the course is gonna consist of
[00:22:16.960]a number of autobiographers and memoirists,
[00:22:21.210]who will give you a sense of the state
[00:22:23.430]of their own upbringings here
[00:22:25.510]and also of their own personal complex relationship
[00:22:29.970]to Nebraska.
[00:22:31.730]Sometimes deeply loving, celebratory even,
[00:22:36.000]sometimes more troubled, more questioning,
[00:22:39.960]more divided, more ambivalent, we might say.
[00:22:43.510]Black Elk and naturalists Loren Eiseley,
[00:22:46.980]Malcolm X, the leader of the Nation of Islam,
[00:22:52.070]activist, political significant,
[00:22:55.620]crucial political figure of the 1960s
[00:22:58.330]who was of course assassinated at the end of that decade.
[00:23:02.070]Tillie Olsen, white working class woman from Omaha
[00:23:05.510]whose work is often celebrated now
[00:23:08.190]as a voice from the margins of American literature
[00:23:11.740]and American women's lives brought to the center
[00:23:15.450]of the way that we think about
[00:23:17.840]contemporary American writing.
[00:23:19.830]Again, through scholarship
[00:23:21.280]that was pursued here in the department of English
[00:23:24.990]at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
[00:23:27.330]And finally Jennine Capó Crucet,
[00:23:29.910]current, a colleague of mine, who you will,
[00:23:32.700]whose work you're gonna hear discuss later on
[00:23:35.100]during the course.
[00:23:36.980]These are all biographical writers,
[00:23:40.560]these are memoirists,
[00:23:42.110]and it's great to be able to hear their particular voices
[00:23:44.730]it's great to be able to see the sheer diversity,
[00:23:48.970]the polymorphous, if you like,
[00:23:53.010]polyphonic you might say, different voices
[00:23:55.650]and different shapes within which
[00:23:57.240]those voices are then placed.
[00:23:58.900]Different kinds of writing that then are created around
[00:24:03.150]the particular life experiences of these authors.
[00:24:06.300]And some of the work that you're looking at here
[00:24:08.540]really is quite striking.
[00:24:10.050]The opening paragraph for instance,
[00:24:11.570]of Malcolm X's autobiography, when he says, you know,
[00:24:15.560]when he was in his mother's womb,
[00:24:16.850]the Klu Klux Klan came to the family home in Omaha.
[00:24:21.890]Malcolm X's book is a gripping
[00:24:25.120]and a transformational read.
[00:24:28.020]And I think when you've encountered that
[00:24:29.850]you've seen something of an America that remains
[00:24:33.490]a vital to us today in terms of the questions
[00:24:36.837]and the topics that Malcolm brings
[00:24:39.410]right to the front of his writing.
[00:24:41.850]So autobiography and memoir occupy
[00:24:43.840]a very major part of what we're about to look at.
[00:24:47.040]And I think it's a good foundation
[00:24:49.000]for us to start with that particular writing.
[00:24:52.310]It gives us a sense of the terrain, as I've said,
[00:24:54.500]it gives us a sense of some of the key topics,
[00:24:57.290]and it introduces you to the very different voices
[00:25:00.210]of these Nebraskan authors,
[00:25:01.577]who gives you a sense of the range,
[00:25:05.670]the complexity,
[00:25:11.152]the diversity of Nebraska voices.
[00:25:13.820]Already you will see that it's very difficult
[00:25:16.740]to pin down a single Nebraskan identity through literature.
[00:25:20.870]What we're actually looking at instead is
[00:25:22.870]a mosaic if you like, or collage almost
[00:25:26.110]of different kinds of voices and writing.
[00:25:29.600]After that we're gonna be talking about fiction.
[00:25:32.270]And here, of course, we would come up against Willa Cather.
[00:25:39.720]I think that just spend a couple of minutes,
[00:25:42.260]just sort of dwelling on, why we do that.
[00:25:45.650]And obviously I have a stake in the game here
[00:25:47.220]because I'm a Cather scholar.
[00:25:49.740]Cather's achievement was formidable.
[00:25:52.470]All of the novels that she wrote remain in print,
[00:25:56.280]all of them, which is itself interesting.
[00:25:59.230]All of them remain
[00:26:02.250]loved and widely read and widely studied.
[00:26:05.470]Cather has an audience
[00:26:07.160]amongst the so called general readers,
[00:26:09.680]people outside of universities who want to read,
[00:26:12.310]who are enthusiastic readers.
[00:26:14.171]She also has a presence within universities,
[00:26:17.240]as somebody whose work is worthy of deep study
[00:26:21.240]and deep attention,
[00:26:23.040]in terms of the different kinds of America
[00:26:25.990]that Willa Cather could bring into her writing.
[00:26:30.749]You might well already O Pioneers and My Ántonia,
[00:26:35.030]two key novels, which are set in fictionalized, Nebraska,
[00:26:39.560]and which use her small town of Red Cloud,
[00:26:43.830]lightly fictionalized as the settings.
[00:26:47.470]But then we also have many other Cather novels,
[00:26:49.270]Shadows on the Rock, Death Comes for the Archbishop,
[00:26:51.490]The Professor's House, Sapphira and the Slave Girl,
[00:26:55.020]which are set in different kinds and different times
[00:26:58.920]of the American history.
[00:27:00.630]Colonial Quebec in the 1690s in Shadows on the Rock,
[00:27:05.310]Antebellum, Virginia, just before the civil war
[00:27:08.220]in Sapphira and the Slave Girl.
[00:27:10.460]Death Comes to the Archbishop, the mid 19th century
[00:27:13.320]world of so-called old Mexico.
[00:27:16.210]As two priests cross that arid terrain
[00:27:20.050]trying to establish the Catholic missions
[00:27:22.947]in the frontier territory as they saw it of that time.
[00:27:28.640]So Willa Cather has an ability,
[00:27:30.230]which again, I think is very important to bear this in mind
[00:27:33.270]has an ability to write both about Nebraska
[00:27:36.010]and to write about a wider American world.
[00:27:40.530]And I think this is a significant point,
[00:27:43.180]that by studying Nebraska, when not turning ourselves
[00:27:46.160]into simple, regionalist concerned with just
[00:27:50.340]the little terrain, seems little in that particular image
[00:27:54.032]that we'd been looking at,
[00:27:56.240]Literary Nebraska with the outline
[00:27:57.700]of the state of Nebraska.
[00:27:59.330]But in fact, Nebraskan writers are also trying
[00:28:03.200]to address larger issues, larger questions,
[00:28:07.260]larger topics that can be said to be
[00:28:10.240]quote unquote "American"
[00:28:11.980]in all of the potential diversity and complexity
[00:28:17.430]and range that that term might mean.
[00:28:20.360]And you can see in Willa Cather's in particular,
[00:28:23.110]a kind of conscious drive to encompass
[00:28:27.280]the layered histories not history,
[00:28:31.100]but histories of what makes the United States,
[00:28:34.340]but also more generally
[00:28:36.230]this hemisphere that we might call North American writing.
[00:28:39.730]She wrote about Canada.
[00:28:41.130]She wrote about a terrain that she defended as being
[00:28:44.910]Mexican, not American.
[00:28:47.380]In a particular letter, she refuted one of her translators
[00:28:51.100]who described the terrain
[00:28:53.740]of Death Comes for the Archbishop as American,
[00:28:56.850]Cather said, it's not American, it's Mexican.
[00:28:59.490]And so all of those things, those details
[00:29:01.270]are really worth thinking about as we ponder about
[00:29:04.020]what Nebraskan writing might mean.
[00:29:06.810]Other fiction writers that you're gonna be looking at
[00:29:09.230]Marie Saunders from the Sand Hills,
[00:29:11.390]another rights with a great connection
[00:29:13.260]to the university department.
[00:29:17.180]Ervin Krause and contemporary novelist, Timothy Shephard,
[00:29:22.050]one of our colleagues, an important contemporary novelists
[00:29:26.805]whose work, I think it's gonna become even more popular
[00:29:30.350]when he publishes a new novel,
[00:29:32.440]I think in the next year or so.
[00:29:35.550]Finally, we're gonna be looking at some poems
[00:29:37.400]and the history of poetry in the state of Nebraska,
[00:29:41.520]and again, within the university is again significant.
[00:29:45.500]We have a range of poets here,
[00:29:48.050]and you can see all the names on the list in front of you.
[00:29:50.980]Particular, of course, we'd want to draw attention to
[00:29:54.020]Ted Kooser, former US Poet Laureate,
[00:29:57.050]and a major figure within this department.
[00:30:00.500]But we also have other colleagues, other friends
[00:30:03.660]Hilda Raz, Grace Bauer, Tyler Hanson,
[00:30:06.160]William Kloefkorn, Matt Mason.
[00:30:08.440]Contemporary authors, whose writing
[00:30:11.470]has helped to establish
[00:30:14.260]Lincoln, Omaha and Nebraska
[00:30:16.360]as significant places for the study of poetry.
[00:30:19.110]And it's a real pleasure that you'll be able
[00:30:21.590]in putting together this course
[00:30:23.170]to think about the fact that you can be able to encounter
[00:30:25.400]some of this again, very rich, contemporary work.
[00:30:30.420]Finally, strange, you might say, but not so strange,
[00:30:33.430]I think addition at the end of the course,
[00:30:37.120]the graphic novel, the comic book, I'm not gonna call it.
[00:30:41.240]We shouldn't really use,
[00:30:42.970]let's use the term graphic novel or comic book,
[00:30:44.910]the graphic novel, graphic novels,
[00:30:49.960]the illustrated work of Chris Ware born in Omaha,
[00:30:54.050]now, living in Chicago, Illinois,
[00:30:56.940]the creator of Jimmy Corrigan,
[00:30:58.550]The Smartest Kid on Earth,
[00:31:00.000]between 1995 and 2000.
[00:31:03.630]A major figure within that field
[00:31:06.490]and a significant Nebraskan figure you might say.
[00:31:12.090]There's a final kind of theme, I just want to touch on
[00:31:15.110]for the last three or four minutes of this talk,
[00:31:17.160]just to kind of wrap up and give you a sense
[00:31:19.750]of one of the things that might tie all of this together.
[00:31:23.030]If you look at Jimmy Corrigan,
[00:31:25.900]if you look at just a page, a few panels
[00:31:28.490]of that particular graphic novel,
[00:31:30.780]you'll see the kind of remarkable ordinariness of the life
[00:31:35.060]that his hero goes about.
[00:31:38.830]If you are reading O Pioneers! or My Ántonia,
[00:31:43.410]if you're looking at the life of Ántonia Shimerda,
[00:31:45.990]in Cather's novel,
[00:31:47.040]if you're looking at the life
[00:31:48.410]of Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers,
[00:31:53.380]the sheer ordinariness of these lives
[00:31:57.870]is significant.
[00:31:59.250]And the way in which the writer,
[00:32:02.070]the way in which the author grants and imagined to space
[00:32:06.640]to the ordinariness of those lives,
[00:32:09.520]I think this is one of the key themes
[00:32:14.400]that you'll see surfacing in so much of the writing
[00:32:17.880]that you're gonna look at.
[00:32:19.120]Which might seem to begin with relatively
[00:32:23.830]slight, which might seem relatively insignificant,
[00:32:27.860]which might seem to lack a kind of heroic or melodramatic
[00:32:31.820]or epic dimension,
[00:32:33.670]but then starts to reveal itself
[00:32:35.510]as something of great significance and great weight.
[00:32:41.950]Cather's writing was immediately recognized
[00:32:44.920]in the 1910s and the 1920s for having a kind of resonance,
[00:32:51.310]which spoke to readers
[00:32:54.130]who had never been to Nebraska
[00:32:55.730]and had no idea about what life really was like,
[00:32:58.530]on the Great Plains, on the prairies of the Midwest.
[00:33:03.010]And that attention to the ordinary, to the everyday,
[00:33:06.530]to the quotidian, to the apparently insignificant
[00:33:09.830]is a kind of theme that you'll see cropping up
[00:33:12.660]again, and again and again,
[00:33:14.780]in much of the writing that you're about to look at.
[00:33:17.160]In the kind of ways in which Ted Kooser can write poems
[00:33:20.790]about simply going for a walk early one morning
[00:33:23.620]in full in Nebraska.
[00:33:25.880]Or Willa Cather, paying attention to the hired girls
[00:33:29.270]who farmed and kept house in small towns in Nebraska
[00:33:33.647]in the 1890s or 1900s.
[00:33:35.950]Or the suburban world that Chris Ware looks at.
[00:33:39.610]Or the apparent ordinariness
[00:33:41.680]of the beginning of Malcolm X's life,
[00:33:43.950]which then explodes into a parable about racism,
[00:33:48.560]violence, exclusion,
[00:33:49.890]and then his own remaking as a significant figure
[00:33:53.510]and a political figure.
[00:33:55.100]All of these narratives are playing with the idea
[00:33:57.660]of what the ordinary might mean
[00:33:59.700]and how the ordinary might reveal the extraordinary.
[00:34:02.850]And I think that's one of the themes
[00:34:04.490]that you're gonna want to look at.
[00:34:07.480]Final figure, just to mention,
[00:34:09.390]if you haven't got enough on your plate already,
[00:34:11.010]and there's lots to read, it's all interesting.
[00:34:13.310]It's all captivating, it's all worthy
[00:34:17.300]of paying attention to the ordinary
[00:34:19.160]to find the extraordinary,
[00:34:20.830]one other thing that you might want to have a look at
[00:34:22.730]is Alexander Payne's film,
[00:34:25.120]significant filmmaker from Omaha, Nebraska.
[00:34:27.950]Film, Nebraska, simply entitled Nebraska.
[00:34:30.580]I wouldn't say anything more about it,
[00:34:31.940]I'll just encourage you to look at it
[00:34:34.050]and to think about what it might mean.
[00:34:35.800]And try to imagine that film or respond to that film
[00:34:40.820]using some of the ideas that I've already suggested to you.
[00:34:45.050]I hope you enjoy the course,
[00:34:46.320]it's a very varied one,
[00:34:47.400]it has many different voices,
[00:34:49.280]both in terms of the people who will be lecturing to you,
[00:34:51.870]and also in terms of the readings
[00:34:53.650]that you're about to undertake.
[00:34:56.030]I think it's a rich and varied terrain
[00:34:58.130]that you're about to traverse.
[00:35:01.130]And I welcome you to Literary Nebraska.
[00:35:03.970]Thank you.

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Introduction to Literary Nebraska | Guy Reynolds

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