Abstract: Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House depicts some characters on frequent spatial movements, such as Professor St. Peter who, in reality, leaves home for Michigan Lake and, in his writing, travels spiritually in American Southwest and Tom who tends his herd all over the pastures, explores secret places, and settles down in a cabin he built. In the past, critics preferred to define the spatial movements in the text as a means of escapism. Using the theories of Deleuze and Guattari on deteeritorialization and reterritorialization, this paper argues that these spatial movements are full of complications that cannot be simplified. Instead, they are actually a series of the so-called “destruction-before-construction” movements sustained persistently by the writer’s active momentum to seek a way out of the American predicament of alienation in the 1920s. For instance, some spatial movements, as we may see in her exploration of Thoreau’s moving to Walden Pond, are intended as attempts to break free from alienation, wake up “neighbors”, launch a campaign of deterritorialization to disrupt the operational mechanism of capitalism, and reflect Cather’s strong will to rid break away from the condition of alienated life. But the movement of deterritorialization is followed by a movement of reterritorialization from nomadic lifestyle to settlement. It is not only a process in which characters transform and “reinvent” themselves through learning and education, but also a process that represents the author’s proposition of reshaping modern Americans into “Renaissance Men”.

Key words: The Professor's House, alienation, "Renaissance Man", deterritorialization, reterritorialization