SoSe 2020 VL Westward We Go! The Literatures of the American and Canadian Wests

The North American West is an extremely powerful concept that has evolved over several centuries in the imaginations of countless people in the US, Canada and abroad. It is an idea (re)produced in books, movies, and paintings which invokes a whole array of abstractions such as frontier, adventure, manifest destiny, opportunity, honor, individualism, and justice. It is often recognized by visual cues such as the cowboy, the horse, the gun, vast stretches of open range, the prairies, and desert mesas. "Going west" usually refers to the act of transcending boundaries and is associated with hopes of self-realization and fulfillment. It is also connected to the urge of expansion and the reaching of one’s limits, which, as Fredrick Jackson Turner has maintained in his famous "frontier thesis," is a key dominant of the American imagination.
This lecture course will offer a broad overview over the American and Canadian West from a variety of perspectives, relying on literature, art, film, and history in order to raise a series of key questions concerning the development of the idea of the West and the concept of "going west." It will focus on the different myths and representations which have played a significant part in the formation of national identities. Our course readings will not only focus on renowned writers of the American West (Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, Mark Twain, and Larry McMurtry), but will also include literatures of the Canadian West, Native American and First Nations voices, Chicano/a writers, and women writers. It will also present the work of painters (George Caleb Bingham, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Remington), look at popular culture ("cowboy" movies) as well as present figures of the popular mythology (Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill). Last but not least, our course will be informed by an understanding that the West is not a monolithic concept or space, but one that encompasses diverse regional cultures, some of them quite different from each other. This understanding will be reflected in the topics to be discussed as part of this lecture course.