Material Memory: Willa Cather, “My First Novels [There Were Two]”, and The Colophon: A Book Collector’s Quarterly

Willa Cather\u27s 1931 essay My First Novels [There Were Two] is an often-cited statement on place in the author\u27s literary oeuvre. In the essay, Cather distances herself from her first novel \u27Alexander\u27s Bridge\u27 (1912) and its imitative, Jamesian motifs and setting. Her second novel \u27O Pioneers!\u27, she writes, was a kind of second first novel, one written entirely for myself and preoccupied with the story of Scandinavians and Bohemians who had been neighbors of ours when I lived on a ranch in Nebraska. As Merrill Maguire Skaggs, Robert Thacker and Emmy Stark Zitter have argued, My First Novels [There Were Two] is also an important document in the author\u27s retrospective construction of authorial identity.* Yet scholars have not, to date, fully explored the occasion for this essay\u27s publication nor the periodical in which it was published. Material Memory: Willa Cather, \u27My First Novels [There Were Two]\u27, and The Colophon: A Book Collector’s Quarterly shows how Cather came to publish her essay of literary debut in The Colophon: A Book Collector\u27s Quarterly. The paper follows George\u27s Bornstein\u27s approach in Material Modernism, which connects literary modernism to a distinct set of material concerns and manifestations. The presentation documents Cather\u27s participation in an intermittent series for the periodical in which various writers of national renown told stories of their first novels and traces connections between Cather and Colophon founder Elmer Adler. *See the following sources: Skaggs, Merrill Maguire. Cather\u27s Violent Assimilation of Henry James\u27s Art. In \u27Violence, the Arts and Willa Cather\u27. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007; Thacker, Robert. She\u27s Not a Puzzle So Arbitrarily Solved: Willa Cather\u27s Violent Self-Construction In \u27Violence, the Arts and Willa Cather\u27, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007; Zitter, Emmy Stark. Making Herself Born: Ghost Writing and Willa Cather\u27s Developing Autobiography Biography 19.3 (1996): 283-301

Goodness and Desire

Philosoph

Data curators at work: Focus on projects and experiences

Editor's Summary Three postdoctoral fellows in a program sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources/Digital Library Foundation are exploring and contributing to the field of digital curation through very different perspectives. With a neuroscience background, Katherine Akers is encouraging scientists to preserve and share research datasets and analyzing the use of library resources. For Inna Kouper, building cyberstructure and facilitating and promoting user engagement are primary. Matthew Lavin is working to make digital tools and approaches serve the needs of humanists, focusing on digitally conveying the physical features and histories of books. With different definitions of data and a variety of research goals, the scholars apply hybrid professional approaches to digital curation, stimulating expanded information, intellectual cross fertilization and a broader view of data, research and knowledge.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102231/1/1720400113_ftp.pd

Normativity in joint action

The debate regarding the nature of joint action has come to a stalemate due to a dependence on intuitional methods. Normativists, such as Margaret Gilbert, argue that action-relative normative relations are inherent in joint action, while non-normativists, such as Michael Bratman, claim that there are minimal cases of joint action without normative relations. In this work, we describe the first experimental examinations of these intuitions, and report the results of six studies that weigh in favor of the normativist paradigm. Philosophical ramifications and further extensions of this work are then discussed

Why We Need a New Normativism about Collective Action

What do we owe each other when we act together? According to normativists about collective action, necessarily something and potentially quite a bit. They contend that collective action inherently involves a special normative status amongst participants, which may, for example, involve mutual obligations to receive the concurrence of the others before leaving. We build on recent empirical work whose results lend plausibility to a normativist account by further investigating the specific package of mutual obligations associated with collective action according to our everyday understanding. However, our results cast doubt on a proposed obligation to seek the permission of co-actors before exiting a collective action, and suggest instead that this obligation is a function of explicit promising. We then discuss how our results pave the path for a new normativism, a theory that neither under- nor overshoots the target given by our common conception of the interpersonal obligations present in collective action.