The Prosthetic Fantasies and Fallacies of Claude Wheeler

The chapter frames Willa Cather’s 1922 novel One of Ours within the context of the US government’s concern about wartime production’s depletion of American forests. Government rehabilitationists and foresters alike sought to place disabled soldiers in forestry-related vocations, which would provide employment and spiritual renewal in nature. These concerns mirror those of Cather’s protagonist Claude Wheeler, who suffers a spiritual amputation at age five when his father cuts down a tree with which Claude had developed an Emersonian kinship. In war he finds spiritual wholeness by offering himself as the prosthetic limbs for those intellectually and artistically superior individuals whom the war has physically and spiritually amputated. Claude’s wholeness comes, ironically, in seeing himself as the trees being cut down for the matériel needed to win the war and civilization to the western world. This self-conceptualization puts him in close company with Italian Futurism, which praises both human mechanization and violence.

To Dance the Native Dance: Vernacular Modernism in an “Australian-New Zealand Comedy Romance”

This article studies The Adventures of Algy, a 1925 “Australian-New Zealand comedy-romance,” and in particular the “Māori dance” performances of its Pākeha heroine, Kiwi McGill. Dance serves multiple functions in the film, reflecting a trend for primitivism in global silent cinema, claiming Māori performance culture for a settler colonial narrative, and acting as a means to translate modern experiences. As such it offers a mechanism to reconsider what Miriam Hansen has described, in relation to the classical Hollywood cinema, as “vernacular modernism” in the form of a minor, and only marginally successful film: “one of ours.”