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Record W1515237773

Willa Cather's Use of Inner Light

2005· article· en· W1515237773 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Asad Al-Ghalith

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational fiction review · 2005
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicAmerican and British Literature Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsArtCharacter (mathematics)LiteratureDepictionPhilosophyAestheticsArt history
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

A noteworthy technique that American writer Willa Cather (1873-1947) uses for effecting characterization is by having character contain light within; light becomes vital elan vital, essential spirit operating within. This becomes apparent to sensitive observer through features actions of individual. Cather seems to capture symbolic significance of light when she establishes light in center of individual. J. E. Cirlot claims that traditionally, is equated with spirit.... The superiority of spirit is immediately recognizable by its luminous intensity. (1) Light imagery has become favorite technique of Cather's to depict characters. Focusing on examples of light imagery in some of novels, I hope to show how this inner light, which flashes through protagonists' eyes features, corresponds to their states of mind as they go through trials triumphs of life. The Song of Lark (1943) is Willa Cather's depiction of spirit, desire, yearning of Thea Kronborg, who tries to realize artistic personality. (2) Cather apparently believed that best way to define Thea's personal artistic struggle was to convey it through image of bright internal fire, intensity of which fluctuates according to intensity of artistic endeavor. The Greeks are known to have represented spirit as a gust of incandescent air, (3) light has traditionally been symbolic of creative force, of cosmic of irradiation. (4) Cather's extensive use of light to picture Thea's artistic spirit creativity is aesthetically justifiable, however much it is exploited. Thea Kronborg's childhood is bathed in light. She loves brilliant desert mountains surrounding Moonstone, bright garden rooms of Kohlers (Thea's neighbors, who host piano teacher), white illumination of moon. At this early stage, piano teacher perceives special qualities of artistic sensitivity in her, she seems to have a face full of light energy, of unquestioning hopefulness of first youth. Yes, she was like flower full of sun (SL 122). However, reader is not struck by allusion to internal fire until Thea matures discovers talent for singing. At this point, internal light is made manifest through features, which appear to emit thermal glow of fire within. Until this point, Thea thinks she will realize potential at piano, but day she sings for music instructor, Harsanyi, is never quite sure where light came from when face suddenly flashed out at him in that way.... At such moments hair was yellower, skin whiter, cheeks pinker, as if lamp had suddenly been turned up inside of her (SL 241). Going through periods of doubt concerning potential to be an artist, Thea appears to childhood friend, Dr. Archie, to be tormented: a light seemed to break upon face from far away--or perhaps from far (SL 307). Dr. Archie feels that knows nothing about Thea during these times as she stands before him and glittered like that all over (SL 308). Thea receives opportunity to sing before professional scrutiny of Mrs. Nathanmeyer, an opera expert, escort Fred remembers how remarkably brilliant beautiful she had been when she sang at Mrs. Nathanmeyer's: flushed, gleaming, round supple, something that couldn't be dimmed or downed (SL 362). The striving artist in has been awakened, fire within is growing stronger. Thea becomes fully illuminated (visually in addition to spiritually) to Fred's observant eyes at Panther Canyon. Watching Thea on distant crag, gets the impression of ... kind of brilliancy of motion (SL 397). When Thea kisses Fred, he felt flash into everything that she had ever suggested to him, as if she filled out own shadow (SL 402). …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.696
Threshold uncertainty score0.990

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0110.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.023
GPT teacher head0.251
Teacher spread0.227 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2005
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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