Dr. Lutes's essay uses affect theory to better understand Willa Cather’s master experiment with legend in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Treating emotions not as interior to individuals but as dynamic impressions within social networks, she connects the novel’s deliberate, nondramatic continuity of feeling to Cather’s understanding of the legend as a genre. The novel articulates the value of legends repeatedly, and Cather viewed Archbishop itself as a legend. The novel’s serene, inexorable narrative of incomplete intimacies celebrates bonds of faith and love, even as it documents failures of understanding and the weaknesses of personal attachments as a form of resistance to oppression. Discovering what she calls “legendary affect” at work does not absolve Archbishop from complicity with racist regimes and colonial enterprises, and the speed with which the text moves on can act as a silencing mechanism. Yet its resolute pace allows Cather to register some of the most elusive and disturbing dimensions of cross-cultural encounters.
The essay evolved from research Dr. Lutes conducted with the help of her First-Year Match student Amanda Gerstenfeld, now a senior English major and a member of the department's Student Advisory Council.
