My Antonia is the story of Jim Burden, a recent orphan who has moved from Virginia to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. It is the tale of his adjustment to frontier life and his friendship with the Bohemian girl on the next farm. The entire novel is a flashback; Jim reminisces as he looks back at Antonia's assimilation to farm and prairie life.
My Antonia is written by Willa Cather, a well-known author who wrote about life on the Great Plains, of settling out west in early 1900s. My Antonia is a canonical text, but I'm not entirely sure how I would use it in my classroom. I will fully admit that I went online to get ideas because I had no idea what to address in the novel. We could look at perspective, as this is a unique one: the novel is written by a woman as a flashback by a man reminiscing about his boyhood, telling the story of a Bohemian woman's migration to the Great Plains of America. Using this concept, the discussion could focus on how the novel would change feeling and perhaps meaning if written from a different person's perspective. We could also focus on description; we could look at class differences (it becomes more apparent once they move to town).
I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, and I'd recommend it to my students who enjoy historical fiction, but again, I'd have to do some serious thinking and researching before I decided to teach it.
1 comment:
years ago, I taught this, to 9th graders. Wish I could remember what I actually did with it, and what I focused on.
I think stuff about immigration and culture and growing up, things like that, might be some of what I did.
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