On Province and Empire in My Ántonia and One of Ours: Cather’s 1922 The Waste Land
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Willa Cather profoundly alters her attitude towards the American experiment, World War I, and the prospect of cultural pluralism in America between her 1918 My Ántonia and her 1922 One of Ours. In doing so, she addresses the issue of what kind of culture America should have: a monistic one such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson advocated or a pluralistic one. In My Ántonia, set during the period of Great Plains settlement but extending up into World War I, she presents an intact American cultural pluralism: non-English speaking European cultures continuing their positive practices absent the monarchic repression of Central European empires. Her ethnic settlements in the Great Plains practice pluralistic democracy without intervention from centralised authority, implicitly reflecting what could happen under an emerging European anti-monarchic ethos or in an America that allowed for many ways of life. In One of Ours, on the other hand, she savages the jingoism that possessed America during, and after World War I: a repression that makes the war disastrous for pluralistic democracy. The dream falters. Her wartime Nebraska becomes repressive for Germans, Czechs, and other divergent peoples. It practices conformity, a new materialism, and meaningless religion. Indeed, the death of her novel’s hero, Claude Wheeler, is not a sacrifice that enables democratic renewal but rather offers us a self-blinded hero who dies in glorious strife only as he sees it. He actually dies for a nation increasingly making itself unsafe for democracy in an army whose soldiers are massively disillusioned by the war. Thereafter, Cather writes little in a positive vein of Nebraska or the Great Plains and its various cultures but turns to earlier New World catalyst communities such as those of Quebec, the pueblos of the Southwest, and pioneer New Mexico.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".