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from the issue of April 1, 2004
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Rosowski is at forefront of Cather studies
BY MARY JANE BRUCE, UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS
A beautiful spring-like day toward the end of a harsh Nebraska winter reminds Susan J. Rosowski of Willa Cather’s description of spring in My Antonia, a paragraph that captures the essence of a season that appears without warning. Rosowski never stops exploring Nebraska through Cather’s eyes.
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| | | Sue Rosowski, University Professor and the Adele Hall Distinguished Professor of English, is a 2004 winner of the University of Nebraska’s Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Award for her work on author Willa Cather, pictured in the poster above. Rosowski is holding a copy of My Antonia by Cather, a volume in the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition, for which Rosowski serves as general editor.
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“When we moved to Nebraska in 1969, I had never heard of Willa Cather,” Rosowski said. “I discovered her as I was discovering what it was to live in Nebraska.”
Rosowski, University Professor and the Adele Hall Distinguished Professor of English, is a 2004 winner of the University of Nebraska’s Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Award. In his letter of nomination, UNL English professor Stephen Behrendt said Rosowski’s research has earned international recognition.
“It is no overstatement to say that Sue has risen to the very top of the field of Cather scholarship,” Behrendt said.
As general editor of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition and editor-in-chief of Cather Studies, Rosowski leads a collaborative research initiative involving scholars at UNL, across the nation and in Canada. Those projects have fundamentally changed the way Cather is read. Rosowski is committed to translating research into varied forums that reach the broad range of Cather’s readers, including those who attend the international Cather seminars that Rosowski directs.
But early in Rosowski’s career, Willa Cather was a detour on the way to another goal. Rosowski read Cather’s A Lost Lady, a book that “struck me with a particular impact,” and then wrote an essay on the book while working on her dissertation on an 18th century novelist.
“I’d play games with myself. If I worked a certain number of hours on my dissertation, I’d please myself by working on my essay,” Rosowski said. “Cather is so accessible but she offers enormous complexity.”
Rosowski’s early interest in Cather was inspired and supported by other Cather devotees, including Bernice Slote, a pioneer Cather scholar at UNL; Virginia Faulkner, former editor of the University of Nebraska Press; and Mildred Bennett in Red Cloud, who worked to preserve the sites Cather wrote about in her novels.
“It was an exhilarating experience to wander into Nebraska and discover all the dimensions of possibility that were centered on Cather,” Rosowski said.
Behrendt credits Rosowski for accelerating the process that enhanced Cather’s reputation and led to her place as a world-class author.
“The landmark rise in interest in Cather dates from the 1980s, which is precisely the period during which Sue was beginning to make the most important and influential contributions to the field,” Behrendt said.
Cather is well suited to multidisciplinary research and teaching, Rosowski said, because her work sheds light on so many areas, from Cather’s creative writing process to the window she provides on the history and culture of her time. Details in Cather’s novels and many of her characters were drawn from real life, revealing a richness and depth that wasn’t obvious at first.
For example, when Cather writes about “breaking sod,” readers today may think of sod as something they buy in a roll at the garden store and spread out at a new housing development. The phrase takes on new meaning when readers understand the deep, complex root structure of sod on the prairie.
“Then all these other questions come into play. What was it like to be at the university, as Cather was, at the time of Charles Bessey and Frederic Clements, botanists and ecologists who were discovering the prairie?” Rosowski said. “Through our research on Cather, we realized that what seemed to be invented details had an actual counterpart in real life. Costumes, manners, expressions and the whole range of details that make up a particular time are re-created with enormous accuracy and authenticity in Cather’s work.”
Rosowski’s research and the production of a scholarly edition of Cather’s novels triggered other developments that enhance the study of Willa Cather. Cather family descendants donated pictures, newspaper clippings, letters and other material that enrich the study of the author and her time. Rosowski said page proofs and corrected manuscripts provide insight into Cather’s creative process.
“It shows how a long-term scholarly project can be a magnet for other scholarly materials,” Rosowski said. “You don’t know what’s there until you do the work.”
In addition to her Cather research, Rosowski’s interests include women writers of the American Plains and West and environmental literary studies. Along with her many books and essays on Cather, Rosowski has written widely on American women writers and the West. Her latest book, Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity and the West in American Literature, received the Thomas J. Lyon Award for the outstanding book of literary criticism in 2000.
Rosowski was also the founding director of the Plains Humanities Alliance, one of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Regional Humanities Centers. She and history professor John Wunder played key roles in bringing the center to UNL.
Her accomplishments in research are matched in the classroom.
“Sue’s students love the experience of working with her because she is so incredibly generous with her time and energy on their behalf,” Behrendt said. “No one gives as much time to her students as Sue does; she is in every sense a model as well as a mentor.”
Rosowski said students who study Willa Cather at UNL have a rich experience because they take field trips to Cather sites and share the same campus that was an intellectual home for the author.
“Teaching is a joy beyond description,” Rosowski said. “It’s a great privilege to be part of a university. I have contact with multi-generations: the students who are just awakening to the world, the doctoral students preparing to go out and make their own impact and the scholars who attend the international Cather seminars.”
Rosowski said she was surprised and moved to learn she had won the ORCA Award. She said the award recognizes not only her research, but also the legacy of work on Cather that began with the pioneer Cather scholars and continues with the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition and students studying Cather today.
First in a series
This is the first in a series of articles spotlighting UNL’s winners of the University of Nebraska’s Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Awards and Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creativity Awards.
GO TO: ISSUE OF APRIL 1
NEWS HEADLINES FOR APRIL 1
Rosowski is at forefront of Cather studies
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