Critical Trends and Reception
While critically neglected for the better part of the 20th century, interest in Willa Cather was aroused in the 1980s with the rise of the feminist movement. Although many of her novels have been subsequently incorporated into the canon, critics have largely ignored The Professor’s House, passing it over on account of it being “morally and psychologically unachieved”. As a reason for this disparagement, critics often cite the “broken” format of the book, rebuking its structure as unnecessary. Or, they cite the ambivalent depiction of the Professor’s psyche. The reader is unsure of how to consider the Professor’s demands for solitude and his entrapment in the past. He’s a family man and a university man, but the Professor’s conflict reaches its crux when he surrenders "local community for the nostalgic national ideal".
Read more about this topic: The Professor's House
Famous quotes containing the words critical, trends and/or reception:
“It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Thanks to recent trends in the theory of knowledge, history is now better aware of its own worth and unassailability than it formerly was. It is precisely in its inexact character, in the fact that it can never be normative and does not have to be, that its security lies.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)