Papers by Catherine G Kodat
University of Iowa Press eBooks, Feb 15, 2018
The Southern Quarterly, 1999
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Jul 7, 2022
Modern Fiction Studies, 2020
This lecture on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping was recorded in October 2020. The lecture was d... more This lecture on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping was recorded in October 2020. The lecture was designed for students and faculty in the Freshman Studies program. This program, a multidisciplinary introduction to liberal learning, has been a cornerstone of the Lawrence curriculum since 1945. The lecturer, Catherine Gunther Kodat, is Provost and Dean of the Faculty and Professor of English. A scholar of 20th century U.S. literature and culture, she has written about the authors William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, and published a monograph on the political uses of culture during the Cold War. She began teaching Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping during the 1990s while an Assistant Professor of English at Hamilton College
Modern Fiction Studies, 2016
Massachusetts Review, 2015
Modernism/modernity, 2008
Rutgers University Press eBooks, Oct 7, 2019
Modern Fiction Studies, 2001
Mosaic (Winnipeg), Sep 1, 2000
George Balanchine's immensely popular 1954 production of The Nutcracker simultaneously create... more George Balanchine's immensely popular 1954 production of The Nutcracker simultaneously created a new U.S. holiday "tradition" and ensured the financial stability of the New York City Ballet. This essays explores how the ballet's effort to repackage a modernist aesthetic as family entertainment resulted from a complex negotiation with the cultural imperatives of the Cold War. In the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been no shortage of studies examining the causes and history of the Cold War. By and large, these studies, such as those by Thomas G. Paterson and John Lewis Gaddis, use the language and analytical tools of political science, economics, and military history. Less common, though no less important to an understanding of the Cold War, are cultural studies of the period. Those that have appeared tend to emphasize U.S. "mass" cultural productions and their roles in shaping or reflecting domestic beliefs and concerns: literature receives some attention, but television, radio, film, and the emergence of domestic "convenience" technology appear most interesting to scholars of the period (see, for example, the work of Robert Corber, Walter L. Hixson, Alan Nadel, Richard Pells, Thomas Schaub, and Stephen J. Whitfield). There is good reason for this emphasis, since it was during the Cold War that electronic and satellite technologies came into their own, fueling the explosion in mass entertainment media and consumerism that we live with today. Understanding why mass cultural productions have proved such popular subjects of study does not, however, explain the comparative lack of interest in the contributions of American and Soviet "high" art--ballet and modern dance, classical music, and drama--to the Cold War political and cultural landscape, especially since such work, like its mass cultural counterpart, often was used not only for domestic entertainment but also for international persuasion. Indeed, following the signing of the first cultural exchange agreement in 1958, the Cold War was waged as much on the stages and in the museums of Moscow, Washington, D.C., Leningrad, and New York City as it was on the airwaves and in the newspapers, as studies by John W. Henderson, Charles Frankel, and J.D. Parks all have shown. And of all the "high" arts of the Cold War, ballet and literature are the most fraught, frequently embodying (both literally and figuratively) the co ntrasting claims of socialist realism and capitalist abstraction. In recent years, dance study has learned much from literary study, as dance scholars have followed their literary colleagues in importing the techniques of semiotics, new historicism, anthropology, sociology, and deconstruction to the work of dance analysis. In this paper, which examines the Cold War flowering of the American ballet through the work of George Balanchine--an efflorescence that, as my example of The Nutcracker shows, was deeply inflected by perceived U.S. diplomatic and domestic needs during the Cold War--I hope literary scholars will see how they may learn from dance study. My project here is to restore Balanchine's 1954 revival of The Nutcracker to its Cold War provenance and thereby to contribute to our understanding both of the workings of Cold War cultural productions and of the complex relationship between artistic productions and the social/political matrix in which they emerge. Furthermore, an appreciation of the contributions made by productions like The Nutcracker to the broader, lat e modernist aesthetics of postwar America seems a necessary next step in the ongoing discussion of the forms, values, and differences among the avant-garde, modernism, and postmodernism as they have been formulated in the works of scholars such as Peter Burger, David Harvey, and Andreas Huyssen. Dance scholars rightly credit Balanchine's mastery of the "plotless," abstract work, and his accompanying innovations in choreography and ballet technique, as his chief contribution to dance history. …
American Literary History, Sep 22, 2007
... his own blood sacrificeis driven less by compassionate grief for the sufferings of the des... more ... his own blood sacrificeis driven less by compassionate grief for the sufferings of the descendants of Eunice and Tomasina than by ... The work of Judith Butler, Edelman, David Halperin, DA Miller, Paul Morrison, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has guided my thinking, even when ...
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Jul 29, 2019
University Press of Mississippi eBooks, Jul 2, 2010
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Apr 19, 2007
American Literary History, Mar 1, 2003
... Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down&q... more ... Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down" (45). ... that makes no mention of the vast scholarship on race, sex, language, and family that has dominated critical work on the novel since the late 1970s; it is asif the groundbreaking ...
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Papers by Catherine G Kodat