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Willa Cather -Fictions of Gender in My Ántonia

Emmeline GROS Willa Cather's My Ántonia (1918) undoubtedly is one of America's literary masterpieces. Critics have celebrated Cather's realism, her choice to truthfully depict "the foundational American story of immigration and pioneer renewal" (O'Brien Emerging Voice 472). The New York Times Review called the book "a carefully detailed picture rather than a story" and other reviewers praising Cather for her "extraordinary reality," admiring her for surrendering "the usual methods of fiction in telling a story" (qtd. in Emerging Voice 472).

These discussions are easily understandable, considering that Cather's realistic portrayal of pioneer life in the West derives from her own childhood memories-a childhood she spent amidst Nebraska pastures-and judging from the fact that the characters of her western prairie novels like O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), andMy Ántonia (1918) are inspired by her own memories of immigrant farmers. Ántonia, for example, is based on Cather's bohemian neighbor Annie Sadilek (Prchal 3).

Cather recognized the importance of the immigrant population, recalling in an interview the impulse that took her to writing. She stated:

When I was about nine, [...] father took me from our place near Winchester, Virginia, to a ranch in Nebraska. Few of our neighbors were Americans--most of them were Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, and Bohemians. I grew fond of some of these immigrants--particularly the old women, who used to tell me of their home country. I used to think them underrated, and wanted to explain them to their neighbors. Their stories used to go round and round in my head at night. This was with me, the initial impulse. I didn't know any writing people. I had an enthusiasm for a kind of country and a kind of people, rather than ambition. (Cather in Person 20) While recognized for her truthful rendering of life in the West, Cather did not choose to write her memories directly, even less to write an autobiography or to publish a diary. She did not account for her lived experience through her own voice or through a female voice for that matter. Quite the contrary. Cather turned to a male narrative point of view and it is through Jim Burden (and his memories) that Ántonia Shimerda is given life. At the beginning of My Ántonia, we witness an unnamed female narrator fusing her own memories of Ántonia with Jim's: I told him I had always felt that other people-he himself, for one-knew her much better than I. I was ready, however, to make an agreement with him; I would set down on paper all that I remembered of Ántonia if he would do the same. We might, in this way, get a picture of her…My own story was never written of her, but the following narrative is Jim's manuscript, substantially as he brought it to me. (MÀ 7) Undoubtedly, surrendering one's voice and welcoming Jim's instead may raise a number of questions. Like Phyllis Rose, readers could justly ponder whether "My Ántonia … [would] have been better [book] if [it] had been told from the point of view of women instead of men?" It might be easy to solve this riddle with a simple "[p]erhaps, but then [it] would not have been the [book] we know" (A.15). Amanda Craig, however, judges that gender bending-or having a female writer resort to a male narrator-may have now become increasingly fashionable especially for male authors, yet writing from the perspective of the other sex remains a particularly uneasy task for women writers ("Writing as Another Sex"). This is so, not only because "men seem to make it their life's work to obscure what they're thinking and feeling," but also because:

Women writing as men […] are just a bit too aware of particularities that heterosexual men fail to pick up on. Apart from Sherlock Holmes, no man created by a man ever notices how somebody is dressed: male characters by women always do. They notice smells and tastes, whereas men in books by men are apparently all suffering from heavy colds.

Added to this difficulty (and keeping in mind that Ántonia Shimerda originates from Jim's memories), personal memory, as Eric Hobsbawn has shown, is always "a remarkably slippery medium for preserving facts" (206). As historians have explained, "memory cannot be independent of cultural influences, but is shaped or even constructed by them" (Summerfield 67). Starting from this premise, readers of My Ántonia should not only wonder if the novel would have been a better book if narrated from a woman's perspective, but rather (and most interestingly) how gender and the norms that specifically shaped Cather's society intersect with the process of creation and how these 'influences' inform (or alter) Jim Burden's narrative point of view.

Gender in Willa Cather's America

The locale chosen by Cather (the great plains of the Midwest) is in itself a heavily-gendered space, one where male and female roles are clearly defined. The Midwest, the Far West, the Frontier have all engendered some of America's most powerful icons of masculinity: the farmer, the cowboy, the cattle-driver, the horseman of the plains, to use Owen Wister's formulation, icons that have often eclipsed attention to their female companions in these open spaces. In most westerns or fictions featuring these icons, the "heroes are male characters who exhibit strong masculine traits such as a reliance on action in place of verbal communication, a lack of demonstrated feelings, and an attitude of dominance toward women" (Timko 3). Jennifer Bailey explains that: women's role in the migration westwards was […] often secondary and reactive. Many were forced against their will to follow their husbands or look for jobs as housekeepers in the West and leave their family and friends behind. [. . .] Some were overcome by the strangeness and hardship of the Western environment and the moral and domestic responsibility that attended this way of life […] Some went mad. (393)

If Willa Cather was influenced by the landscapes that she experienced during her childhood, she was also very much affected by the social and historical context in which she grew up. Cather was born in 1873 during the Gilded Age of America, an age which "rigidly defined male and female roles and encouraged members of society to work within those conventions" (Everton 18). This period also contributed to reinforcing the female versus male-coded spaces that the Great Plains, like the western environment, embodied. It was the time of the "separate spheres" doctrine, a time "encouraging men to be concerned about their character," to value "self-control, honor, loyalty, independence, self-sufficiency, and a sense of duty and integrity" (Hoffert 334,qtd. in Everton 12).

In the popular magazines of the period (in the Ladies Companion of 1860 for instance), one could read that "a really sensible woman feels her dependence. She does what she can, but she is conscious of her inferiority, and therefore is grateful for support" (Sanford 15, qtd. in Welter 159). Men also were prescribed specific traits (aggressiveness, self-assertion, motivation, determination, etc.) that "they needed to possess, and the quality of their maleness was defined by how well they performed within their prescribed gender roles" (Everton 4).8

Questioning Gender Norms -The New Woman

Gender norms and models however rarely go unquestioned. At the same time that manuals advocated the ideal of true womanhood and at the same time that "success" manuals advocated a strong, muscular, protective and virile model of "ideal" manhood, a "New Woman" emerged within Cather's society. This "New Woman," who can be defined as "single, well-educated, independent, self-sufficient, and strong-willed" (Hoffert 283,qtd. in Everton 12), proclaimed her right for education, employment, and the vote (which ultimately was passed by Congress June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920, with the 19 th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution).

This "New Woman" contaminated female literary versions of land settlement. These versions tended to move away from the idealized version of the feminine role as the 'Angel in the House' ideal of Victorian homes. As Bailey notes, in female literary versions of land settlement, "it is apparent that this kind of [female] experience develops into serious and significant questioning of a familiar literary tradition based on a masculine ethos" (394). As a matter of fact, most female writers from the 1920s (like Ellen Glasgow, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and Willa Cather) "undermine the metaphor of the garden as the apotheosis of moral and social order in the civilized settlement. [… they] reject the notion that the garden of the civilized settlement, with its moral and social order, is personified by the ideal feminine woman" (Bailey 394).

The consequences for men were inevitably dramatic: Hoffert explains that "[a]djustments in gender roles and relations began to emerge. In the end, independence, courage, and activity were still considered to be quintessential manly virtues, and work was still central to man's identity, but by 1920 men did not have exclusive claim to those attributes and activities" (297,qtd. in Everton 14). The 1890s had marked the close of Frontier with Frederick Jackson Turner boldly asserting on July 12, 1893 that the western frontier was now closed. Now, as the separate spheres doctrine waned12 , the assertion of manliness had heavy ideological import, and many men, Silber explains, thus "hoped to capture a sense of masculine authority [...] they tried to resurrect a sense of sexual order, which was assumed to be natural and immutable, as a way to counteract what seemed to be a decaying social hierarchy and their own loss of control" (167). 15

Willa Cather and Gender

Cather felt these social and cultural transformations as a reality. As Everton explains, Cather is a paradox, a contradictory figure:

She has been labeled by some scholars as the "Midwestern Mother" whose novels celebrate the heart and soul of Nebraska. She has also been labeled a feminist, a lesbian, and even an anti-feminist. She is also seen by some scholars as modern, but old-fashioned by others. This ambivalence with regards to her identity lies at the core of the life of Willa Cather. She defies being labeled and packaged because she sought throughout her whole life for sole authorship over her identity. ( 18)

Cather also enjoyed appropriating a male identity. E. K. Brown notes how, In her high-school days she wore her hair shingled, shorter than many of the boys. Her clothes and hats were also boyish: a starched shirt, a tie, and a hat almost like a boy's. She did not care to be called Willa; many of her friends used Willie, but to this she preferred Will or Bill; and it gave her a particular satisfaction when a perceptive, appreciative person would call her Dr. Will. (48). If Cather's tint at cross-dressing obviously pointed to her desire for troubling gender norms (using Butler's own words here) and for self-definition,17 numerous critics have also considered Cather's genderfluid identity as a sign of the author's "lesbian desires" (Everton 18).

While evidence of Cather's lesbianism has been discussed at length, 18 Cather remained very private about it and never called herself a lesbian. Problematically so, Cather publicly denied that gender was psychologically powerful or culturally meaningful. As a young magazine columnist in the 1980s, for example, she boasted to readers of the Pittsburg Home Monthly that "the fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambition to be a pope or an emperor" (WP 1:337, qtd. in Lindemann Queering America 86) and, using the pseudonym Helen Delay, she urged parents in selecting books for their children to avoid making the "hateful distinction" between boys' books and girls' books for as long as possible (WP 1:368, qtd. in Lindemann Queering America 86). A strong feminist, she often claimed that being "a girl never damaged [her] ambitions to be a pope or an emperor" (WP 1: 368).

And it did not: Cather who figured on the list of Pittsburgh's "Pioneers in Women's Progress" (qtd. in Cather in Person 3), became an award-winning novelist, one of the "great American writers" (to use critic H.L. Menken's expression), and she did so by distancing herself from other "female" writers. She often wondered "why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, [for] they usually make such an infernal mess of it" (Kingdom of Art 408) and attacked her fellow women writers with such vehemence "that critics have recently wondered if the concept of 'female misogyny' might not apply to her" ("It Ain't My Prairie" 117).

The Choice of a Male Narrator in My Ántonia

Taking into consideration Cather's rejection of gender conventions and the writer's view on her own sex and/in fiction, it seems hardly surprising, therefore, that she should have chosen to play with gender and to pick a male narrator for My Ántonia. Phyllis Rose recognized that "[w]hen she became a novelist, Cather […] memorably adopted a male point of view," to the point that Phyllis Rose argued that "Cather's biography should have been named 'Williams: The Life of Willa Cather'" (qtd. in Lee 38). More surprising maybe, however, is the overwhelming importance accorded to this masculine presence which, some critics have argued, forces itself through/into the text at the expense of women. Deborah Lambert regrets that with My Ántonia, Cather has "stopped portraying strong and successful women and began to depict patriarchal institutions and predominantly male characters" after O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. She asserts that My Ántonia [i]s Cather's transitional novel (Lambert 680).

The choice of a male narrator may be explained by different but interrelated factors. Lambert explains Cather's choice, arguing that Jim Burden, both narrator and protagonist of the novel, embodies a fictional version of Cather herself, "in some sort an incarnation of the author" (Sergeant,qtd. in Hoover 73). If indeed, Jim Burden is here to "speak from [Cather's] own sexual identity and express her own emotions for women" (Lee 153), understandably then, this cover-up might be seen as a continuation of the masquerade that Cather had started when she was a teenager. O'Brien reminds us that Cather's "lovers remained heterosexual, her narrators-enraptured by sensual and maternal women-male" ("The Thing Not Named" 94).

Other critics, distancing themselves from this narrator-as-a-mask interpretation, have offered another explanation for Cather's transition to a male narrative point of view, arguing that it may only be natural "to see the world, and women, from the dominant perspective, when that is what the world reflects and literature records" (Lambert 680). Read in this light and no matter how insecure, rebellious, or unconventional Cather may have been, her choice of a male narrator would but reflect that, as a woman, Cather "had to resort to male masks", because she "never completely freed herself from male constructions of femininity" (O'Brien 'The Thing Not Named' 596).

Maybe then, one should find fault with an author who is "guilty of denying (her) womanhood" since she celebrates "male activity and institutions" in novels like My Ántonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop (Lambert 680,qtd. in "The Thing Not Named" 594). Lambert blames Cather for celebrating "one of the most familiar stereotypes at the end of the novel where Ántonia is portrayed as a poor but happy mother of eleven, a stereotype […which] distorts and reduces the lives of women's individual identity, and where motherhood and nurturing promises false fulfillment" (687, qted. in Paulsson 3).

In light of the stereotyped gender roles at stake in My Ántonia and considering the prevalence of gender-or gender trouble, to be more exact-in Cather's private life and in Cather's times, the analysis of gender in the novel will thus address the following questions: does a male voice ultimately-as Lambert seems to suggest-reinscribe gender roles within a "natural" or normative structure? Does Cather use of male narrators (and centers of consciousness) signify the writer's blind acceptance of patriarchal values? When portrayed from a masculine perspective (or when these are seen, observed, and remembered through a male gaze), are women always forcefully restrained and considered as abstractions or objects only?

Certainly, and inherent to the construction of My Ántonia is the admission that the novel remains a man's perspective, that of Jim Burden who possesses narrative, creative, but also linguistic authorities over the characters surrounding him: as the possessive 'my' suggests, we are getting a picture of "her" through Jim's "My". Seizing the pen is also clearly presented as a male-gendered activity, suggesting "not merely that women do not usually write but that women in the profoundest sense cannot write" (Kerrison 17). Because Cather's "own story was never written" (MA 8) and because Ántonia is unable to write in English, Lindemann recognizes that "for Jim, the language of imaginative possession and the self-aggrandizing rhetorical gesture are part of his birthright as native-born American male endowed with a 'romantic disposition'" ("It Ain't My Prairie" 119).

Interestingly however, readers soon realize that, unlike the traditional narratives in which the hero (or central protagonist) is almost inevitably constructed as masculine whereas the objects and/or obstacles marking heroic quests are usually defined as female, Jim is found retreating to the back of the stage, while his wife, Ántonia, Lena Lingard, the Hired Girls take precedence. Evidence of this can be found in the opening pages of the introduction to My Ántonia: here, Cather proposes to introduce Jim Burden to her readers. Yet, the presentation of Jim "the obscure young lawyer, struggling to make his way in New York" (MÀ 5) is soon obscured by the presence of his wife, Geneviève Whitney (whose description occupies the remainder of the third paragraph in this page). In addition, and as Fisher-Wirth remarks, even though Jim seizes the pen, Jim "exists only as the (fictive) creator of this highly artful novel" (MÀ 42). She adds that Jim is no creator, but "belongs to the world of death", since he is childless, trapped in a sterile and unloving marriage" and because "apart from Ántonia, Jim has no story; of the twenty years that intervene between parts 4 and 5 of the novel-years during which he ages from twenty to forty, marrying, becoming a lawyer, settling in New York, he says not a word at all (MÀ 42).

For Lindemann, the narrative structure itself seems to "tilt the scale in favor of the women's side in the battle for linguistic power" ("It Ain't My Prairie" 117). One must remember that in My Ántonia, Jim's story is first and foremost that of a woman (Cather) framing a man (Jim) writing a woman (Ántonia). As such, it is the feminine "which gets the first and last word and is presented as the authoritative speaker" ("It Ain't My Prairie" 117).

Considering Jim's propensity to lose control over his own narrative and considering the high probability of unwelcome (understand 'women's') voices to erupt through the text,21 it is only logical maybe that masculine authority maybe aligned with man's desiring to reinforce or redraw strong gender binaries, thus confirming that manliness equals with man's dominance over the women in Nebraska.

The snake episode in Chapter 4 of My Ántonia serves this purpose. In this episode, Jim finds himself facing, then killing a very large snake, and claiming "I was now a big fellow" (MÀ 33), thus accomplishing a rite of passage into manhood, one that is validated by his (female) supporter/admirer Ántonia. 22 Yet, Ántonia cannot afford the luxury of admiring men forever. As Everton explains, "[w]ith the death of her father, Ántonia is forced to work on the family farm for her family to survive, and this shift in her role sparks a change in her identity" (44), or at least in the way she is now perceived by Jim. Ántonia is portrayed wearing "the boots her father had so thoughtfully taken off before he shot himself, and his old fur cap. Her outgrown cotton dress switched about her calves, over the boot-tops. She kept her sleeves rolled up all day, and her arms and throat were burned as brown as a sailor's" (MÀ 70).

Clearly enough, when Ántonia can no longer live by the ideals of "true womanhood," she is thrown into the world of the 'grotesque'. Jim notices that she eats "so noisily now, like a man" (MÀ 70) and boasts "how much she could lift and endure" (MÀ 71). Throughout the episode, Ántonia is clearly defeminized, considered as an object of grotesque curiosity, a mixture of male/female characteristics. Jim notes: "I saw her come up the furrow, shouting to her beasts, sunburned, sweaty, her dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest dustplastered (MÀ 72).

The episode is particularly interesting since the emphasis is placed on Jim's visual appreciation of Ántonia. As Emily Paulsson argues, "what behavior is considered appropriate and what is not for a young woman [is made obvious] through the eyes of the novel's male narrator Jim" (5). That vision should complement memory as the sense through which Jim experiences the 'new' Ántonia is hardly surprising, since the gendered visual relations in My Ántonia certainly invoke Mulvey 's influential paper on phallocentrism and visual representation which contends that women are typically the objects, rather than the possessors, of gaze. Vision-as Peter Brooks explains-is a "typically male prerogative" whose object of fascination is the "woman's body" (88). 23 It is also the sense best adapted to express this type of dehumanization" since "vision works at a distance and need not be reciprocal, it provides a great deal of easily categorized information, it enables the perceiver accurately to locate (pin down) the object" (Scheman 173).

What is at stake here is Jim's delusion-forced by Ántonia's subversion of what he feels is feminine propriety and by her stepping outside of set gender boundaries. What is even worse for Jim is the fact that Ántonia takes great pride in this literally made-up masculinity: she says: "Jim, you ask Jake how much he ploughed to-day. I don't want that Jake get more done in one day than me. I want we have very much corn this fall" (MÀ 61). Ántonia also brags: "I can work like a man now" (MÀ 61).

Understandably and considering that vision is indeed a male prerogative, the mixing of female and male identity promoted by Ántonia's "I" in the above examples forces Jim's "eye" to reconsider the limitations imposed by gender and by a patriarchal order demanding that women be both contributing to the farm-work and confined to the domestic sphere of the kitchen, the drawing-room. Most importantly, in this 'I' to 'eye' encounter, "Ántonia's identity" becomes a site/sight of anxiety. "My" Ántonia escapes Jim's possession since Ántonia's identity, to use Helvie's expression here, is no longer "explainable in terms of [the] traditional categories of 'masculine' and 'feminine,' 'male' and 'female'". The reward of gender bending is obvious: the "binary categories begin to collapse" (Helvie 36,qtd. in Rabin 31).

In My Ántonia, anxiety about the masquerade of femininity or the female 'grotesque' body is clearly manifested in Jim's description of another woman, Lena Lingard . Lena is grotesque, because she is overtly sexual, escaping (or overflowing) it seems, in the sensual power she exerts over her "gazers" (and over their dreams), the very "gaze" that attempts (or is supposed) to frame her. If Jim rejects Ántonia's androgenity (her liminality as neither man nor woman) by turning her into an abnormality (she is a woman who "yawned often ... and kept stretching her arms over her head" (MÀ 70)), Jim equally rejects Lena's femininity by turning it into another abnormality. Everton reads here Jim's "fear of women," arguing that "there is an undercurrent of apprehension found in the dream" since, in Jim's dream/nightmare, Lena is "coming toward him holding a reaping hook, a tool usually associated with death" (MÀ 41).

Certainly, Lena's performance of womanhood in these scenes is another masquerade-that of excessive femininity-one however that is utterly independent of the prevailing sexual or marital economy of 19 th Century culture. Surprisingly so, Lena's tempting sensuality in her short skirt does not aim at securing a husband. What Lena really wants is to secure her independence and female agency (MÀ 156).

The idea of womanliness as masquerade is nothing new. As a matter of fact, the explicit positioning of masquerade as a typically-feminine prerogative supports the view defended by Joan Rivière or Luce Irigaray which "has been repeatedly deployed for its potential to deconstruct an essential notion of femininity and characterize it as a masquerade in a phallic economy of desire that may or may not hide a repressed but potentially destabilizing female erotics" (Walton 17).

Nevertheless, Lena's masquerade, like Ántonia's, is problematic. For Luce Irigaray: masquerade has to be understood as what women do in order to recuperate some element of desire, to participate in man's desire, but at the price of renouncing their own. In the masquerade, they submit to the dominant economy of desire in an attempt to remain 'on the market' in spite of everything. But they are there as objects for sexual enjoyment, not as those who enjoy. In this scene, Lena is obviously both object of sexual enjoyment and subject of enjoyment, asserting that she will kiss Jim as much as she wants. Once again, binaries begin to collapse, with Lena leaving Jim to be "drifting [since she] had broken up [his] serious mood" (MÀ 155).

In a similar vein, Mary Ann Doane explains that "masquerade is not theorized by Rivière as joyful or affirmative play but as an anxietyridden compensatory gesture, as a position which is potentially disturbing, uncomfortable […] as well as psychically painful for the woman" (47). Undoubtedly, both Lena and Ántonia's self-transformations do not serve to refocus the male gaze upon a consciously constructed image of femininity instead of the real self (Craft 830). Ántonia's self-admiring posture, as she asks Jim "to feel the muscles swell in her brown arm" (MÀ 78) or Lena's enjoyment at seizing-and not refocusing-the (male) gaze when "look [ing] sleepily and confidently at one from under her long lashes" (MÀ 91) clearly point to the subversive potential of feminist aesthetics.

Ántonia, for sure, is not catering to Jim's fantasies. Unfortunately, however, "some of the most memorable images in the novel are those of Ántonia showing her willingness and eagerness to work hard in the fields while wearing a man's clothes and shoes" qtd. in Paulsson 4). Consequently, the most memorable image, we understand, is not that which is kept in Jim's memory as an "ideal" (or as a child), but rather the very concrete and diminishing image of Ántonia who is forced to assume a man's role in the fields. Such images would thus seem to facilitate an understanding of the woman's statusas seen through Jim's memories-as spectacle rather than spectator, as passive rather than object, as object rather than subject. Yet, My Ántonia is also, and probably most importantly, the story of a woman stripped of spectacle, of a woman who not only steps out of gender conventions but also regains her "looks" in the eyes of Jim and, to some extent, in her own eyes.

As Claudia Johnson sees it, "women [traditionally] rarely look," because she explains, "[u]sually they are too insane-like Sterne's mad Maria or Burney's idiot woman-to return a lucid gaze; too ashamedlike Goldsmith's Olivia-to meet a looker's eyes; or too delirious-like Marianne Dashwood (in Austen's Sense and Sensibility) to care" (169). If such is the case, My Ántonia constructs and considers gendered visual relations that complicate the (traditional) female/passive gaze. At stake in the reunion with Ántonia in book V "Cuzak's Boys" is the attempt to 'freeze' Ántonia into an ideal. Jim explains: "I did not want to find her aged and broken: I really dreaded it" (MÀ 173).

Despite the logic of Jim's argument, however, Ántonia, we can argue, writes herself out of objectification. In effect, life in the plains and on the farm disavows Ántonia's position as a visually available object by supplying a pragmatic and decidedly non-erotic reason for her visibility. In this final meeting, Ántonia "came in and stood before [him]; a stalwart, brown woman, flat-chested, her curly brown hair a little grizzled" (MÀ 175). Ántonia, this time, becomes visible in the text as a battered woman having lived "as much and as hard" (MÀ 175). In this instance, she becomes visible, we might say, because her body is aged and exhausted, not for the purpose of display (Bode 190). Thus, while the view of Ántonia in terms of her "flat-chested, curly brown hair" features dehumanizes her, the anxiety around looking at Ántonia again is quickly resolved through the mention of a specific historical context that, we could say, mitigates her visibility and her position as object of an all-powerful male gaze. The narrator not only stops objectifying her, but also invokes pathos and the end of the novel portrays what we could call a celebration of a woman battered by age and life (MÀ 175). Jonathan Gross recognizes that: My Ántonia is emphatically not a story of the boy getting the girl 'after long years,' of becoming disappointed with her or sharing in her shame. Rather, it is about a boy attaining the "philosophic mind" to appreciate Ántonia's human dignity (her "grizzled" hair) despite all the hardship she has been through and to accept her unconventionality in the best Byronic, Wordsworthian, and romantic spirit.

It is probably not surprising that in this scene, Ántonia's and Jim's eyes meet and Ántonia fixes her looker's eyes in the scene: "we stood looking at each other. The eyes that peered anxiously at me weresimply Ántonia's eyes. […] She was there, in the full vigour of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me" (MÀ 175). 25While admitting Peter Middleton's theory that the male gaze is the one which "triangulates vision, knowledge, and power" (in Schehr 29), Cather, in the above instance, seems ready to complicate the traditional equation between power, vision, and masculinity. She complicates it even further, by revealing that this power is not always over women and that men also can become "a submissive, objectified object" (Sweeney 1). One example occurs at the Cutters. During the night Jim spend at the Cutters in Ántonia's room, he experiences the "disgustingness" that women in Nebraska, like the hired girls, may be facing in town. In this episode, Cutter creeps back into his own house and up to Ántonia's room.

In this episode, Jim not only becomes the victim of "the detestable bearded countenance that […] was bending over [him]" (MÀ 134), but also ends up bruised by Cutter, hat[ing] [Ántonia] almost as much as

[he] hated Cutter" (MÀ 135). The scene clearly reveals Jim Burden to be unconvincing as a man: Jim not only finds himself in Ántonia's bed, in a feminine passive position, but his "sexlessness -as Grant Overton has argued-is betrayed throughout the novel in details that "no boy would have observed and that a man would not recall. The intonation in some scenes is not in the least masculine" (qtd. in Nettels 148).

Of course, the homosexual tension felt in the scene is relieved through the triangle of desire that Cather builds up. Eve Kosofky Sedgwick would probably consider Cutter and Jim's relationship in this scene as developing what she calls an "homosocial bond" to describe the social bonds between persons of the same sex. At stake here, however, is a triangulation of desire with two men clearly fighting for one (heterosexual) goal, Ántonia. Consequently, unconventional (masculine/homo) sexual desire is redirected (and rendered safe), so that the woman becomes both a pretext and alibi. Yet again, in this scene, Jim is further feminized since he becomes as much "object" as "subject" of the gaze: "I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My lip was cut and stood out like a snout. My nose looked like a big blue plum, and one eye was swollen shut and hideously discoloured" (MÀ 135).

Because, as Everton explains, "Jim does not want others, and especially men, to find out about this incident" (39), Cather's here parodies Jim's possible construction of masculinity, by revealing it as 'outer' directed, i.e. as subject to male approval-ultimately therefore, as performance only. Jim asserts: "I could well imagine what the old men down at the drugstore would do with such a theme" (MÀ 136). In doing so, Cather delinks masculinity from a necessary or essential connection to dominance and patriarchal power and forces her readers to think of masculinity (just like femininity) as an aesthetic project.

My Ántonia reveals that the novel is as much about "My" Ántonia as about "My" masculinity, revealing well that Cather has understood Constance Penley and Sharon Willis' critique of a masculinity that tends to be stabilized (and passed on from one generation to the next, as attested by the reference to Jim's grandfather figure in this passage) by an association with masculinism, machismo, heterosexism, or heteronormativity ('Introduction'). Jim experiences the power of the male gaze, one that is linked to the desire to objectify or to demystify in order to objectify (Sweeney 2). In doing so, and by situating Jim in the position of the one to be "looked at," Cather enriches Ántonia's subjectivity (confined to the extremes of ideal femininity or grotesque masculinity) since she undermines Ántonia as the "sole" object of vision and aesthetic enjoyment/disgust. Clearly, and as evidenced from close reading of certain episodes of looking, the gaze as a tool of (masculine) dominance critical of the emerging New Woman at the nineteenth century's end is complicated by Cather. Virginia Woolf once claimed: "I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore" (Pargiters). Willa Cather, by contrast, embraces the masculine point of view in My Ántonia, making of gendered narratology an essential concern in her fiction. Since a masculine voice is presumed to have greater authority, Cather explores the ways women authors might take advantage of this bias by using a male narrator in order to establish and subsequently reveal the performativity of such authority in their writing.

Men, Cather argues, should not stop talking about themselves anymore, because when they do talk, as in My Ántonia, they reflect how both manhood and womanhood are perceived, constructed, and performed. If as Carolyn Korsmeyer explains, vision-the quintessential aesthetic sense-possesses "power, [namely] power to objectify and to subject the object of vision to scrutiny and possession," attacking the paradigms of authority inherent in a given text signifies a revisionist attempt to attack male representation. Also, and since "man's control and domination of the written language has trapped women inside a male truth" (Howe 12), attacking the paradigms of authority inherent in a given text signifies a revisionist work to the traditionally male or "marked" history of writing the feminine.

In her dissertation, Everton devotes several paragraphs to the rigid gender ideals in the Gilded Age, looking at the manly virtues that men needed to display in order to achieve real manhood (3-10).

The 1890s saw the founding of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and the birth of female-led Progressive Era reform movements.15 Roosevelt, in particular, stressed his ideal of the 'strenuous life' as a solution to the pervasive 'sissiness' that threatened the vitality and future of the nation. On this subject, one could read: 1920: The Year That Made the Decade Roar.(New York: Pegasus, 2015).

For a discussion on Cather's masculine persona, refer to Jan Goggans's "Social (Re)Visioning in the Fields of My Ántonia".

Theories regarding Cather's lesbianism are based on her strong and intimate relationships with other women (among whom, Louise Pond, Isabelle McClung, or Edith Lewis, Cather's companion for most of her adult life). Read Janis Stout, A Calendar of Letter of Willa Cather.

For the "critical female voices […that] periodically erupt out of Jim's narrative," refer to Lindemann, "It Ain't My Prairie".

For a close analysis of gender roles in this episode, refer to Emelie Paulsson's "The Limitations of Rigid Gender Norms in Willa Cather's My Ántonia".

[START_REF] Berger | Ways of Seeing[END_REF] even extends this observation (formerly used to criticize Hollywood movies) in culture at large, saying that "men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at" (47).

Terence Martin shares a similar point of view, by arguing that "the novel does not present the story of Ántonia; it does, I believe, present a drama of memory by means of which Jim Burden tells us how he has come to see Ántonia as the epitome of all he has valued" 308). Women are but abstractions and memories that supplant reality.


Emmeline Gros

Laura Barberan

Florian Schwieger

Keywords: Medici Effect, multicultural educators, autobiographic narratives, teaching assistants, contact zone, Teaching, Methodology, Linguistics, teacher education, genre studies, classroom discourse studies, and language pedagogy

RESUME:

Cette publication (2010) est apparue comme le résultat d'une communication faite lors d'un colloque traitant de pédagogie et d'enseignement (Atlanta, 2007). Cette communication (faisant intervenir des Graduate Teaching Assistants d'origine allemande, française, argentine ou chinoise et responsables des cours de composition en anglais et techniques de rhétoriques auprès de natifs anglophones) avait voulu engager une réflexion didactique sur le rôle de "médiateur culturel" dans l'enseignement et l'apprentissage de l'anglais spécialisé. Traitant de la position du locuteur non-natif face aux locuteurs natifs apprenants, la question centrale était de savoir ce que l'on pouvait entendre par locuteur natif ou non-natif. Pour Adam Chomsky, par exemple, le simple fait d'être humain donne la capacité de discerner entre le vrai et le faux grammatical. Le locuteur natif pour Chomsky n'a pas de réalité sociale. Pour d'autres, au contraire, l'environnement social joue un rôle même inconscient. Dans notre cas, le problème n'est pas d'être intégré dans une culture étrangère ni même de perdre sa culture source mais plutôt d'être accepté et reconnu pour ce que l'on est par l'autre communauté de langue. Plutôt que d'essayer de se rapprocher d'un locuteur natif, l'enseignant de langue étrangère (le non-natif) va pouvoir devenir un médiateur entre sa propre culture et celle de l'autre et inscrire son enseignement dans un ensemble languediscours-culture.

ABSTRACT: University education in the United States has become an increasingly global environment. In the classrooms of a modern university students and teachers from literally all corners of the world come together and reshape the face of higher education. Without a doubt the multicultural classroom of the 21st century necessitates fresh pedagogical approaches to university instruction that questions both established student and teacher models. This article then addresses intercultural relationships within a multicultural university classroom setting and the resulting changes for the conceptualization of student and teacher roles. While the essay raises interdisciplinary and multicultural issues we wish to encourage international and American readers alike to ponder fresh questions about the transnational learning environment of the modern university and consider how teaching in this ever-evolving atmosphere forces us to question ourselves. Finally, this essay is guided by the conviction that a culturally diverse classroom, both on the level of pedagogical theory and practice, is the foundation of a successful university education in the 21st century.

PAPER:

The idea for this article grew out of a professionalization conference organized by the English Department at Georgia State University. We, a group of three international graduate students from Germany, France, and Argentina, got together and shared our understanding of what it means to work as teaching assistants in the humanities in an American university from a foreigner's perspective. To our surprise, we discovered that despite coming from different countries (and continents), our university experience at home appeared to have been astoundingly similar. However, we also realized that all of our educational backgrounds varied greatly from the American educational system we were then experiencing at GSU, both as students and teachers. One obvious difference lies in the less strictly defined hierarchies established in the American university, where graduate students in the humanities often become responsible for teaching classes as teaching assistants during the course of their academic pursuits. Yet perhaps the most interesting distinction is the diversity we found at our American alma mater and the immense educational potential of such an environment. Unlike our own fairly uniform college experiences in our respective home countries, what we witnessed at GSU can be best described as an intellectual contact zone: a space in which the most diverse body of students and teachers converge, producing a unique learning environment. We discovered that in the multicultural classroom of the 21 st century, "otherness" and cultural diversity are an integral part of the learning process that must be embraced, rather than restricted, in order to provide quality university education in increasingly globalized institutions. Moreover, we realized that becoming a multiculturally responsible educator also means to recognize that teachers and students are part of the larger process of "transforming higher education from a monocultural to a multicultural institution" (Castaeda 41).

In The Medici Effect (2006), Frans Johansson refers to early Modern Florence as an "intersection," where "different fields meet" while triggering an "explosion of remarkable innovations" that occur as a consequence (2). The Medici metaphor emerges from the outburst of creativity that took place in Florence during the Italian Renaissance, when different ideas-conceived and circulated by "sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, financiers, painters, architects" (Johansson 2) -converged under the patronage of the Medici family. This exceptional "intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures," Johansson explains, allowed for the combination of "existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary new ideas" (2).

Barberan, Gros, Schwieger [START_REF]For a flexible model of cultural understanding[END_REF] Similar to the phenomenon described by Johansson, we would like to propose, the university classroom has become a place of intersection and combination, a "cultural contact zone," to use Mary Louise Pratt's term, which harbors enormous educational potential. In this respect, a look at the demographics of a modern, urban research university, such as Georgia State University, confirms the heterogeneity of its student population and substantiates the continuing cultural diversification of the American classroom. Therefore, it is not only possible to realize how modern American research universities create a "Medici Effect" of their own but, in fact, every single culturally diverse classroom can produce unique and rewarding forums for new ideas.

If we then apply Johansson's concept to our own teaching practices, it becomes clear that educators should embrace diversity as the breeding ground for fruitful productivity.

Teachers should not only treat the diverse classroom as an opportunity to instill tolerance and respect, but also understand diversity as an actual necessity for the highest quality of education to take place. From a pedagogical standpoint, then, what in the past could have been perceived as a problem-with the urge to strive for uniformity and accountabilitytoday becomes an opportunity for development beyond barriers. The task of educators, as the epistemological Medici of the 21st century, thus centers around providing ways to allow all the different voices and perspectives to coexist effectively in order to reach more creative solutions to educational challenges that binary teaching models (with traditional Western philosophy at the top of the hierarchy) seem unfit to address. Consequently, multicultural educators, as Carolyn Jackson rightfully notes, "must abandon the use of simplistic recipes for learning and monolithic representations of people based on their cultural backgrounds, physical appearances, and intellectual abilities" (63). Instead, educators must strive to further develop the existing pedagogical methods in order to productively address the new understanding of student-teacher roles, literacy, and identity that the multicultural classroom of the 21 st century has produced.

We do not wish to imply here that our own education abroad was faulted because of its apparent homogeneity, but that we recognize the vast possibilities of a classroom where fresh ideas from various cultures cross-pollinate and grow. By scrutinizing, and eventually unseating, our own, often internalized, pedagogical frame we wish to encourage international and U.S. readers alike to ponder fresh educational questions about the transnational learning environment of the modern university, and consider how teaching in this novel environment forces us to question ourselves. In this effort, we follow Geneva Gay in her conviction that autobiographical narratives and personal stories "act as mirrors, opportunities, and Barberan, Gros, Schwieger [START_REF] Castaeda | Teaching and learning in diverse classrooms Routledge Falmer[END_REF] invitations" and therefore help ourselves and others to "look inward and outward in becoming multicultural educators" (7). This essay then hopefully serves as a point of departure for future analytic discussions of the interrelation of educational traditions and contemporary challenges in the increasingly global world of higher education.

Five or Seven Continents?: A Cross-Cultural Comparison Between the Argentinean and the American Student

A few years ago, I was teaching an English 1102 composition lesson at Georgia State University to a group of about 20 American students. We were working with argumentation and support, so I asked my students to try to respond to a proposed argument with "new, original ideas," and not just with something that everybody would know, such as "the fact that the world is made up of five continents." I thought that my random example was selfexplanatory, but when my students' faces looked puzzled, confused, even amused, I had to ask what was wrong.

"There are seven continents in the world, Ms. Barberan!" "You didn't know that?" Needless to say, I felt initially perplexed. I even doubted myself: Could I simply not remember such an obvious, basic fact? What followed was one of the most enlightening moments of my cross-cultural teaching experience. Born and raised in Argentina, I had learned that our world is divided into five continents: Africa, America (only one continent), Asia, Europe, and Oceania. The list the students shared with me, on the other hand, included seven: Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.

Without thinking twice, I took this opportunity to talk to them about cultural differences, how people can have such dissimilar outlooks about the same thing, and how thinking in binary oppositions of right or wrong oftentimes can be misleading. Instead, I told them, we should try to understand that we form part of a diverse world where people have different but equally valid perceptions (and we were just talking about geography!). I then spent some time with the "cultural conversation," feeling satisfied that I had contributed with my little seed to a heightened and respectful awareness of differences. Once I had finished talking, a student at the back timidly raised his hand and asked me: "Very well, Ms. Barberan, but now you know that there are seven continents, right?" Everybody laughed. I laughed.

What happened that day taught me a valuable lesson: Coming to a different culture means emptying oneself of assumptions and welcoming new perspectives. What may have Barberan, Gros, Schwieger 5 been obvious to me was evidently not obvious to my students, and I can imagine how they may have felt when I unintentionally challenged one of the most basic common knowledge facts they learned at school; after all, they challenged my own understanding of the world, and it felt uncomfortable, to say the least.

Before arriving in the United States to teach in 2002, my sponsoring company, Visiting International Faculty Program (VIF), asked me to compare the educational systems in Argentina and in the United States. [START_REF] Althen | Manual for foreign teaching assistants University of Iowa Press[END_REF] They provided me with a detailed description of the American educational system and the "American student," while I had to present the same information about my home country. According to the VIF Instructional Handbook, the American student is "verbal, outspoken, and questions authority … is respected as an individual whose opinion is valued … strives for independence [and] values personal choice" (2002, 121). These are, of course, general parameters, but they served me as a good starting point to consider how different or similar students across cultures can be.

I then tried to think of my own experience as a student during the course of my 5-year program (1994-9) at the School of Languages, now Facultad de Lenguas, National University of Crdoba. Being a student in this public university was intense, while those apprentice years are perhaps best described as a Darwinian struggle for survival. At the time, just to be accepted into the program, students had to pass a competitive exam after taking a leveling course. Once in, classes were generally conducted inside vast auditoriums (where bringing food would be unthinkable), with professors lecturing at the front to a group of often hundreds of students. In an environment where one gets lost among the many faces and where professors and students relate only from a distance-a "fountain of knowledge" educating the "eager recipients"-the boundaries establish themselves from the beginning. While students in the United States generally pay substantial amounts of money for their education, in my home country public universities are highly subsidized by the government. This benefit allowed me to study practically for free, but did not entitle me to make any special demands on the university such as having frequent one-on-one meetings with professors or email conversations. Unlike here in the United States, professors in Argentinean public universities do not generally conduct office hours, so personal contact becomes a rare occurrence. A student typically sees the professors only for class and for the day of the gargantuan final exam. As far as Teaching Assistants, the closest to the American GTA position in my home country involves helping the professor in charge of a class with some objective tasks, but never assuming complete control, while access to such privilege depends on the student's academic merits and it is often ad honorem.

Barberan, Gros, Schwieger 6

With this academic background, I came to work as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at Georgia State University while completing my Ph.D. in Literary Studies. What initially caught my eye was the size of my class (never more than 25 students) and its ethnic and cultural diversity. Argentina can be considered relatively homogeneous in terms of ethnicity, religion, customs, etc., so the richness of this new environment immediately attracted me. At the same time, it forced me to rethink who the "American student" is, because what I found in my classroom did not fit one single category. In this respect, GSU's body of students creates a microcosm of the world. An ordinary group of freshmen a GTA may encounter any semester can include first-or second-generation immigrants from India, Iran, Colombia, Kenya, Palestine, Mexico, China-just to name a few of the cultures I had the privilege to meet.

Students, on the other hand, seem accustomed to having instructors from every corner of the world, as a look at the faculty working at GSU proves. As the instructor, then, I make it my duty to bring attention to the necessity of finding new and varied alternatives to a problem, while the challenge lies in drawing everybody's perspectives into class discussions in an atmosphere of respect and collaboration. Half-way through the semester, my students already understand that for any topic discussed, we will examine every possible angle. In fact, what the text does not mention or does not represent will help us find the prevailing ideologies under the surface, while the more culturally diverse the class is, the easier it becomes to unsettle and question such ideologies. Once the students discover this need for difference, class discussions reach a level of depth and involvement that I believe can translate into their practices in society. My hope is that, as future professionals, they will require difference in order to achieve the most original and ground-breaking results in their work endeavors, and that "multiculturalism" loses its status as a "buzz" word we often hear about but rarely understand what to do with it, and actually gains the relevance it should have: Cultural diversity facilitates and promotes positive change, creativity, and innovation.

Understanding that basic premise changed my whole teaching practice. In this regard, as a now happily adjusted international teacher, I have no secret formula. I only try to design learning tasks relevant to my students' needs, challenge them intellectually, and provide a space where diversity of perspective is not only desirable but also necessary to reach productive conclusions. If we want to educate contributing citizens in today's increasingly heterogeneous society, our role as teachers lies in facilitating instances where cultural "differences," as Louise Rosenblatt explains, "are to be seen as alternatives" (53). The connections that arise as a result of combining cultural perspectives in turn foster creative solutions to problems to which one-sided approaches can only provide limited or partial Barberan, Gros, Schwieger 7 answers-and here I echo Edward Said's concern in Culture and Imperialism (1993) with the "modern university's secular mission … to be a place where multiplicity and contradiction coexist with established dogma and canonical doctrine" (321). [START_REF]Foreign teaching assistants in U. S[END_REF] On my part, as a South American teacher, I had to meet my students halfway, yet they had to travel the distance as well in order to benefit from my "foreign" experience. In this respect, it is clear to me that the classroom of today in American universities is a space where both students and instructors can look at the world and question the weakness of apparently fixed "facts"-whether one speaks of a map with five or seven continents-in order to find meaningful, innovative answers to the challenges facing our present moment.

Teaching in the Global Classroom

Students and teachers of English in the 21 st century inhabit a global classroom. As this crosscultural learning space provides seemingly endless opportunity to improve university education, it also creates unprecedented challenges for all participants. Creating a truly multicultural classroom depends therefore on the prior recognition of the different elements that come together in the transnational melting pots of university education. From the particular classroom methods of university professors to the fundamental differences in mapping and imagining the world, identifying and acknowledging a student's or teacher's unique cultural heritage becomes a pivotal requirement in the English classroom of the 21 st century. Standing in a composition classroom and suddenly realizing that your students think about the world as a conglomerate of seven continents rather than five illustrates beautifully the pedagogical and even personal challenge teachers face in a cross-cultural classroom environment. However, the anecdote also acknowledges the importance of sociocultural pedagogies that see "identity as fluid and changing" (Hammerberg 649). Moreover, it exemplifies that one of the most crucial skills for a multicultural educator is to be able to teach students to respond constructively to comprehension break-downs (Hammerberg 653).

In a university classroom, "cultural differences may often go unnoticed by learners [and teachers] until they actually create a problem (Liddicoat 278). Thus, detecting, acknowledging, and embracing these differences, what Giroux calls "border pedagogy," is one of the most fundamental features of a successful multicultural learning environment.

Besides variations in cultural identity and cultural practice, however, there are oftentimes profound variations in the way different nations structure their university education. These variations may include teaching methodologies, the relationship between students and Barberan, Gros, Schwieger 8 professors, or the learning environment, but they are especially evident in the way graduate students are prepared for their future as university professors. In some countries, as in my native Germany, there is very little preparation.

"Teaching, No Thank You:" Accounting for the Absence of Teaching Assistants in the

German Academic Environment

Graduate teaching assistants are, without a doubt, an undiscovered species in the German academic system. Although a speedy "discovery" and subsequent employment of motivated and able graduate students would, I believe, prove beneficial, there are very valid systemic reasons for the absence of graduate teaching assistants. On an organizational level, German university students traditionally enter their degree program of choice straight out of high school without the additional burden of having to complete core curriculum requirements. Thus, students seeking a master's degree in American Literature will take classes solely related to their field from the moment they enter the university. This ability to limit class requirements to major-related courses, grounded in the stratified German high school system, allows for concentrated 5-year degree programs. In an academic environment that does not require students, regardless of their intended major, to take basic composition classes such as English 1101 or English 1102, the teaching load of, for instance, an English department faculty as well as the dependence on teaching assistants becomes drastically reduced.

While the structural organization of German universities contributes greatly to the absence of graduate teaching assistants, it is the perceived relationship between professors (the "learned") and students (the "learning") that best explains this phenomenon while revealing a general, transatlantic difference in the conceptualization of fruitful academic education. Graduate students in Germany are exclusively students. Professors, as well as instructors, on the other hand are clearly defined as those who have left the world of exams and term papers behind, earned their degree, and established themselves within the academic community. This belief in strictly separated student-teacher roles serves mainly to maintain quality academic education, but, of course, also connotes the hierarchical nature of traditional German university learning. Detaching graduate students from both teachers and teaching does, on the one hand, further a sense of self-determined academic education which allows, sometimes even forces, students to take responsibility for their own learning. Unfortunately, on the other hand, many graduate students, especially those who strive for a career in Barberan, Gros, Schwieger 9 academics, perceive their time in graduate school as both sheltered from and unconnected to the realities of their future occupation. Barberan promised myself to stick as closely to the teaching objectives our department had given out as a safety net for graduate teaching assistants. I further decided that it was in the best interest of the students, and myself, to not reveal too much of my "Germanness." Well, it turns out I didn't have to do any revealing anyway. The students, from the very beginning of the course seemed fascinated with the idea, and the apparent paradox, of having a German guy teach them English composition. As the semester progressed I realized that my fears had been the product of my inability to see beyond what I had learned and experienced myself. I had been afraid of insufficient authority on my part because of the simple fact that I perceived authority as the result of age and accomplishment, two characteristics I clearly lacked. But I learned that the American composition classroom is not a strict hierarchy. Instead, the two classes in that first semester taught me that a productive learning environment can rest on respect for the individual qualities of both the student and the teacher, including their specific cultural background. In a sense, I believe, my students were motivated and respectful because I am from another culture. Now, after almost three years in the classroom, it has not only become apparent to me that enlisting graduate students early in their academic career as teachers allows them to collect invaluable, practical experience. More importantly, my own experience as a foreigner teaching in an American academic institution has taught me the fundamental importance of Barberan, Gros, Schwieger 11 transnational teaching practices and learning environments in an increasingly global world. In a multicultural environment such as Georgia State University that unites students from "every state in the nation and over 145 countries," an ethnically coherent classroom has ceased to exist. Instead, increasing educational globalization has generated, what Mary Louise Pratt coined, the classroom as "contact zone"-a transnational social space "where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other" (34). It is thus exactly the diverse experience and background students and teachers bring to the classroom that creates a rewarding learning environment for both. Attempting to realize a truly global classroom means to embrace, rather than limit, different perspectives and responses from the students and the teachers to both classroom discussion and assignments. However, in order to fully realize the cultural democratization of the university classroom, professors and teaching assistants alike have to abandon the spell of Western pedagogical hegemony that still bewitches many, foreigners and natives alike, who enter the American classroom. Of course I am not trying to suggest that we should hastily abandon our cherished pedagogical foundations and personal values. Instead, I am promoting a heightened sense of cultural awareness inside and outside the classroom. I believe, for example, that if I would have been aware of the fact that my initial challenges in the classroom were the result of the internalization of the "German system," I might have been a better teacher in that first semester. If we are trying to become transnational educators in a transnational arena, we have to understand ourselves as translators between different, and even competing, cultures. I therefore believe that we have to become ambassadors of a "culturally responsive pedagogy" (Irvine 73) that promotes "border crossings" between the various groups within the classroom and encourages the teachers to become "translators of culture" (Shapiro et al. 116). The foremost responsibility of the teacher then becomes to appropriately identify one's own personal and cultural limitations as well as the advantages of a German, Argentinean, or French education and share them beneficially with the many other cultures in the classroom of the 21 st century. already taught in France) yet I had never imagined-among other things-that I would be "left" on my own and as such find myself responsible for preparing and giving lectures, monitoring, grading written examinations, or even answering students' questions on a daily basis.

The French Way, the American

Of course, teaching assistants do exist in France, and their workload varies from teaching in private graduate schools to public universities. However, rarely are teaching assistants asked to have full responsibility for planning and conducting a course. [START_REF]For a flexible model of cultural understanding[END_REF] I can still remember the anxiety I felt when I arrived on the campus no more than a week before classes started. I was handed a document labeled "Resources for Instructors of English" together with a small package of books, was told to read it, and was thrown into the classroom. I must confess that I was probably more frightened than I had ever been before, not really by the work or the responsibility itself but by the way professors trusted me as fully capable of doing it. As I perceived it, I was a foreigner, not only in terms of culture and identity, but also in terms of competence. U.S. universities have long employed graduate students as teaching assistants to work as part-time instructors. As Judith Levinson-Rose explains, TAs are trusted as professors in the becoming and "perform several important functions at the university … Their responsibility ranges from supervised, quasi-clerical assistance for a professor to completely autonomous instructional decision making for a large undergraduate class" (Levinson-Rose and Menges 102). Seen through the eyes of a French university student, the transition from graduate student to teaching assistant (or negotiation between the two), however, seemed far more complicated than what is often regarded as a "common" phenomenon in the American classroom. I was in for a shock, for I was in charge of teaching a course that students were required to take (not an elective), which, in France, would probably have been "reserved" to certified professors. [START_REF] Castaeda | Teaching and learning in diverse classrooms Routledge Falmer[END_REF] I knew what it meant to be a student, at least a French student: Follow the schedule, sit in large auditoriums, write essays or papers with subjects already assigned, and rarely ask any questions to the professors who, once the lecture was over, would quickly leave the room until the next lecture. It must be added that, in France, only a relatively small portion of high school graduates go on to the university, since most students choose to go to "grandes coles," private business schools, music schools, or independent technical institutes. And within the same university system, the law school, the arts and humanities, and the sciences, are regarded as "independent" entities, which means that students studying physics will never share a course with a student majoring in English, for instance. At Georgia State, however, I Barberan, Gros, Schwieger 13 remember taking my first class and sharing my views on a specific subject with a vastly diversified group of students. As a consequence, a vital part of my own experience abroad was to be able to understand the mindset of people from different cultures, majors, and interests. The specificity of the American system, in that regard, comes precisely from the "globality" of a mandatory course like English Rhetoric and Composition, for instance, in which a student majoring in Business can sit next to a student majoring in English. The ensuing exchange of ideas triggered by this "melting pot" of students is unique and contributes largely to the diversity of the American classroom beyond a social, religious, or even ethnic diversity. When students bring their cultural strengths with them, both they and the classroom is enriched.

When I became a teacher myself, I quickly discovered that the classroom behavior in the United States and the students' attitudes toward their teachers was "informal," to say the least. On the first day of class, afraid that students would throw me out of the classroom because of my French accent (let us not forget that I am teaching English to native speakers), I soon realized that they addressed me in an informal way that I would have never dared in an auditorium: "Oh, really! You're French, where from?" or "I went to Paris last summer. Gosh, French people smoke!" If American students look at the classroom as a space to feel at easea space to bring soft drinks, food, and sometimes books-they also tend to consider the teacher as someone who would not only come to lecture but who would also learn their names, smile, and be willing to engage in some informal conversation outside of the class.

Interestingly, the University of Iowa specifies those to its foreign teaching assistants:

The U.S students… may have had a less rigorous academic experience than … those students in your country who follow an academic or university-bound curriculum. U.S. freshmen and sophomores may also be at least as interested in their social lives as in their academic lives.

For them, "college life" is not just an intellectual experience, but a phase in their lives that is intended to focus on social and cultural activities as well (Althen 3).

Georgia State being a very heterogeneous community, my students expected me to share something about my own background and culture. Yet, accustomed to a wider social distance between lecturer and students, I found myself trying to adapt to a new culture where the teacher needs to maintain a delicate balance between flexibility and discipline. As Bailey, Pialorsi, and Faust explain, "the foreign TA, like any foreign student coming at an American university, must undergo a process of acculturation in order to be effective in the U.S. classroom. In other words, he or she must, to an as yet undetermined degree, 'become more like us' in order to function" (17). More than the switching of languages, teaching English to Barberan, Gros, Schwieger [START_REF] Liddicoat | Pedagogical practice for integrating the intercultural in language teaching and learning[END_REF] native-speakers has entailed for me the necessity to switch between various roles, to become not only a professor, but also a mediator between cultures. I had been a student, I had been a teacher, but I quickly realized that I had never been a mediator. I had no idea of how to diplomatically deal with my students' questions about France or their complaints when they found that lectures and readings were boring, or out of date, and when they argued that the syllabus I followed did not make sense. Obviously (in my case at least), the classroom became the site of cross-cultural encounters which also involved identity negotiation in a "global contact zone," in which people with disparate historical trajectories and cultural identities interact, "often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination" (Pratt qtd in Singh & Doherty 11). Therefore, if I wanted to become an understanding mediator between cultures in the classroom, I needed to be able and willing to recreate, what Lothar Bredella terms, "the context of the foreign, take the others' perspective and see things through their eyes" (29). This process does involve embracing differences and in turn being "able to distance [oneself] from [one's] own categories, values and interests" (Bredella 29). I experienced an interaction of this kind when I taught a class of American literature, for I quickly realized that the specific literary training that I had received (and later taught) in France posed a problem in the American classroom.

Of course, there is not one way of appreciating literature, even less a French way. Yet, the close reading of one particular passage of literature, as the French structuralists call it, consists of following a set of "reading" rules that does not focus on the reader (or "audience") and his or her individual or personal experience of a work. Criticizing a text means focusing attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work. Understanding the meaning of a text becomes a very unifying experience, since most text-oriented critics assume that one can understand a text while remaining immune to one's own culture, status, personality, and hence "objectively.

In the American classroom however and, to my surprise, students would impart "real existence" to the work. There was a tendency for most of my American students to complete the meaning of a text through interpretation by projecting their own background onto the story. In that context, it was the classroom, more than the text itself, that generated meaning and knowledge. Soon enough, debates, open questioning, individual responses, or paraphrasing imposed themselves (at least for my students) as valid alternatives to the closereading exercise I initially had in mind. Of course, such an exercise was not conventional in the specific context of the American classroom; yet, I could not help but think that my students were "corrupting" the act of reading. In my demand for "authenticity" (at least my Barberan, Gros, Schwieger [START_REF] Pratt | Arts of the contact zone[END_REF] own vision of authenticity in reading a text), I was pushing for a uniform way of reading and writing, which failed to reflect the diversity of contexts in which literature is supposed to be learned and used. The conceptual framework that I had internalized from years of study in France, I realized, could become a major source of misunderstanding. As Claire Kramsch and Steven Thorne specify: "[w]ithout a knowledge and understanding of … genres, no 'understanding of each other's lives' and no reconfiguration of one's own is possible" (100).

As time progressed, I therefore decided to aim for appropriateness rather than authenticity. Seen in that light, interpretation and reader-response no longer felt like an alternative but as a reading exercise that was complementary to the French one. [START_REF] Crawford | Becoming an L2 user: Implications for identity and culture in the language classroom[END_REF] Such a reading, by pointing in directions never considered before, forces students and teacher alike to enter unknown territory: that of embracing new perspectives. It is precisely, I believe, at the intersection of the individual differences among readers' responses that a contact zone is created within the classroom: the "foreign" teacher and the "foreign" students met when literature became not only an object to apply unitary literary techniques but also a way to reveal the diversity and creativity of individual interpretations. As my individual experience shows, this encounter, however, could only be achieved when I accepted to challenge the myth of the "teacher" (or authority) as the sole arbiter of learning and when I engaged in discourses that, while acknowledging differences, helped learners achieve understandings across cultural boundaries. [START_REF] De Beaugrande | New foundations for a science of text and discourse[END_REF]

CONCLUSIONS

It has been a good 500 years since the Florentine city state became the epicenter of the Italian Renaissance under the patronage of the Medici. While the political accomplishments of their reign quickly faded, it was the cultural and artistic legacy of the period that achieved historical immortality. And although it would be presumptuous to assume that teaching assistants and university instructors can measure their educational impact against the patrons of Donatello, Fran Angelico, and DaVinci, it is nonetheless fruitful to learn from their method.

Similar to the city of Florence during the golden age of the Renaissance, the American classroom of the 21 st century has, undoubtedly, become a marketplace of both contrasting and coexisting ideas and cultures. Edward Said had already diagnosed this tendency early in the nineties when he argued that to "match knowledge in the arts and sciences with [the] integrative realities [of multiculturalism and minority discourse is] the intellectual and cultural challenge of the moment" (331). This ongoing diversification, as our personal experiences testifies, is clearly not limited to the student body. In fact, the increasingly heterogeneous Barberan, Gros, Schwieger [START_REF] Rosenblatt | Making meaning with texts: Selected essays Heinemann[END_REF] nature of the global classroom has by now permeated every fiber of the educational matrix of our society, including teachers, curricula, and institutions at large. Whereas some might lament the vanishing of the traditional educator, we believe that the affirmation of a culturally diverse classroom produces unique opportunities that will, in the end, benefit both students and teachers alike; for it not only enables its participants to contribute to and comprehend a global reality, but also allows educational institutions to become forums where remarkable ideas emerge and intersect.

We have tried to share here three visions from different continents that have met in one of the most productive intellectual grounds: the university. When we entered the American university system, our expectations of both teacher and student roles in the classroom of higher education was largely based on our own experiences. For all of us our mono-cultural background initially seemed to be a hindrance and even a source of insecurity, in that our new surrounding appeared to be vastly different in its socio-pedagogical make-up.

What we learned, however, over the course of the last couple of years, is that cultural difference, and especially the introduction of unfamiliar practices and concepts to the humanities classroom (from both teachers and students), can be an invaluable component in creating an interactive, interesting, and innovative learning experience for all parties involved.

Out of this experience grew our conviction that a culturally diverse classroom, both on the level of pedagogical theory and educational practice, is the foundation for successful university education in the 21 st century, and that the teachers are blessed with the unparalleled opportunity of becoming epistemological Medicis, but also face the challenge of managing it responsibly. 7 Implications for Teacher Education Programs," further explores this issue of self-perception. 5. We find here an example of what de Beaugrande calls "discourses of solidarity," which "promote negotiation and collaboration among [all] participants," rather than discourses of power, which "promote authority and confrontation and pursue goals of some participants at the expense of others" (de Beaugrande 2).

6. Addressing the teaching of the English language (not literature), Jane Crawford comes to the same conclusion in her enlightening article, "Becoming an L2 User: Implications for Identity and Culture in the Language Classroom." 7. Our understanding of pedagogy follows theorists of critical pedagogy, such as Giroux and Popkewitz, and asserts that teaching and learning is at all times embedded in cultural practices and political power structures, while being concerned with issues of identity formation. Therefore, in order to meet the challenges of an increasingly diverse classroom, it is imperative to constantly improve existing teaching models and methods. Following the important work of earlier models by Kitano, Chesler, and Jackson, Jacueline Jordan Irvine, for example, proposes six helpful revisions of traditional teacher roles: teachers as culturally responsive pedagogists, teachers as systemic reformers, teachers as members of caring communities, teachers as reflective practitioners and researchers, teachers as pedagogicalcontent specialists, teachers as antiracist educators (73 ff.).

, Gros, Schwieger 10 "

 10 Teaching, Yes Please": Becoming a Teaching Assistant at Georgia State University (While Being German) After a year as an exchange student and an additional term finishing my master's degree, I entered the PhD program at Georgia State University in the fall of 2005 and became part of a legion of approximately 75 graduate teaching assistants. Being the product of the above-described German academic environment, the perspective of teaching lower-division composition and literature classes while being a graduate student myself filled me therefore equally with anticipation and angst. Not only did I doubt that I was adequately prepared for teaching-mainly based on the fact that I never had myself, nor ever witnessed any other fellow graduate student, teach a class in my native Germany-but I further questioned that my understanding and expectation of academia would be compatible with the American university classroom. How could I be a figure of authority when I was still a student myself (and a foreign one)? How could I teach a composition class when my specialty is literature? I was about to find out. Before I walked into the classroom on my first day of teaching in the fall of 2005, I

  Way: Learning to Negotiate Cultural Differences in the Global Classroom When I was awarded the Georgia Rotary Student Program Scholarship in 2002, I had no idea that my initial year of study at Georgia State University would lead me to enter the PhD program and start a new degree in an American university. Only a year after my arrival, I began teaching for the modern and classical languages department, and a few semesters later, for the English department. I knew what it meant to teach undergraduate students (I had Barberan, Gros, Schwieger 12

Notes 1 .

 1 The Visiting International Faculty Program (VIF) is the United States' largest cultural exchange program for teachers and schools. It began in 1987 with the intention of bringing to the United States teachers from all over the world in order to foster an international approach to education and advance cultural understanding. 2. Said takes this description from Alvin Gouldner. 3. In France, the traditional Attach Temporaire d'Enseignement et de Recherche (ATER) position is indeed something that is earned after careful analysis and selection among the Barberan, Gros, Schwieger 17 numerous PhD applicants. The number of positions offered is quite limited, and the appointment regarded as an honor. This year (2008-2009), at the University of Avignon, France, for instance, two ATER positions were offered in the English Department. 4. Lia.D. Kamhi Stein, in her article "Preparing non-native Professionals in TESOL: