« We Sat in the Observation Car » : la modernité et l’éthique de la distance dans My Ántonia de Willa Cather
Duplay, Mathieu
« We Sat in the Observation Car » : la modernité et l’éthique de la distance dans My Ántonia de Willa Cather - 2018.
57
Since the mid-1970s, Willa Cather has been claimed as one of their own by critics keen to defend various liberal causes; but this interpretation of her novels is challenged by the ambiguous posture she adopts towards the very idea of progress, which she treats with suspicion. This article defends the opposite hypothesis—that Cather is in fact what Antoine Compagnon terms an anti-modern writer, one who is fascinated by modernity yet in whom it arouses feelings of uneasiness, anxiety, and even fear. In Cather’s world, the rising sense of loneliness—defined by Hannah Arendt as the loss of the proper distance between the self and others, between the subject and itself, between the self and the world—is what characterizes modern experience at its most disturbing. In My Ántonia, Cather seeks to counter this threat by offering a reassuring and, at times, almost utopian vision, but this is still a way of pointing out, albeit indirectly, what is most problematic about a time of deep ethical crisis.
« We Sat in the Observation Car » : la modernité et l’éthique de la distance dans My Ántonia de Willa Cather - 2018.
57
Since the mid-1970s, Willa Cather has been claimed as one of their own by critics keen to defend various liberal causes; but this interpretation of her novels is challenged by the ambiguous posture she adopts towards the very idea of progress, which she treats with suspicion. This article defends the opposite hypothesis—that Cather is in fact what Antoine Compagnon terms an anti-modern writer, one who is fascinated by modernity yet in whom it arouses feelings of uneasiness, anxiety, and even fear. In Cather’s world, the rising sense of loneliness—defined by Hannah Arendt as the loss of the proper distance between the self and others, between the subject and itself, between the self and the world—is what characterizes modern experience at its most disturbing. In My Ántonia, Cather seeks to counter this threat by offering a reassuring and, at times, almost utopian vision, but this is still a way of pointing out, albeit indirectly, what is most problematic about a time of deep ethical crisis.
Réseaux sociaux