Seminar: Vertiefungsmodul Themen, Genres, Epochen der amerikanischen Literatur/Amerikanistik Literatur II, Anglistik Literaturwissenschaft: Themen, Motive, Autoren der englischsprachigen Literatur I und II - Details
Seminar: Vertiefungsmodul Themen, Genres, Epochen der amerikanischen Literatur/Amerikanistik Literatur II, Anglistik Literaturwissenschaft: Themen, Motive, Autoren der englischsprachigen Literatur I und II - Details
Seminar: Vertiefungsmodul Themen, Genres, Epochen der amerikanischen Literatur/Amerikanistik Literatur II, Anglistik Literaturwissenschaft: Themen, Motive, Autoren der englischsprachigen Literatur I und II
Untertitel
Writing the American West: Dismantling the Myths of Modern America, 1960-present
ANG.03929.02 und ANG.03934.02:
MA Angloamerikanische Literatur, Sprache und Kultur (120 LP) und MA Englische Sprache und Literatur (45/75 LP);
ANG.03210.01 und ANG.03208.01: LAG, LAS;
ANG.04630.01: LAG, LAS ab WS 12/13;
Mag., D, LA (alt)
Critics often point out the vast gap between myth and reality in the depiction of the American West in popular culture and usually zero-in on Hollywood’s filmic portrayals of a culture of violence in the “Wild West” that actually was much more peaceful than American cities are today. What they neglect, however, is the subversive strategy of dismantling myths of the Old West and Modern America in the realm of Western fiction itself. Rather than identifying differences between myth and reality, post-1960 Western novels challenge the conventions of the genre (e.g., the male Western hero, guns and gunfights, and archetypal conflicts such as good vs. bad and virtue vs. evil,) and rewrite them in creative ways. In this course, we will first determine classic elements of Westerns (novels and movies: e.g., Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian, 1902, and the movie High Noon directed by Fred Zinnemann, 1952) and then we will closely examine two ‘revisionistic’ Western novels from the 1960s that question the traditional ingredients of Westerns – John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing (1960) and Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964). Finally, we will jump ahead to the 1990s and analyze Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian (1992), which the eminent critic Harold Bloom has called “the ultimate western.”
Please read Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing and Berger’s Little Big Man before the course begins.
Required texts:
- John Williams, Butcher’s Crossing, 1960 (New York Review Books Classics, 2007)
- Thomas Berger, Little Big Man, 1964 (Dial Press, 1989)
- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 1992 (Picador, 2011)
- Additional texts will be made available on StudIP.
