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The Quotidian Sublime: Cognitive Perspectives on Identity-Formation in Willa Cather's My Ántonia

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From: The Arizona Quarterly
Date: 20051001
Author:Hill, David

TRACES OF A PLOUGHED-OVER country road, the memory of a wagon-ride on that road, and a day riding across Iowa in a dusty railroad observation car with a hot wind blowing through the open windows. Out of these scenes from My Ántonia and their somewhat complicated temporal relationships, Willa Gather wove a complex meditation about the class of experiences that have in aesthetic theory fallen under the label "sublime"-here, an ordinary, quotidian sublime like that toward which Wordsworth pointed in his 1814 preface to "The Excursion," when he hoped to find "Paradise, and groves / Elysian, ...

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