Charmion Gustke (English) presented “Social Networking at the Fin-de-Siècle: The Demise of Courtship in Edith Wharton and Willa Cather” at the Willa Cather International Seminar at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusettes on June 27. Gustke’s paper, a reading of Wharton’s Summer and Cather’s Lucy Gayheart, applies William James’s “stream of consciousness” to explore the elasticity and presence of American self-hood at the close of the 19th-century.
