“Go West, young man, and grow up with the country” was a famous headline of the New York Tribune in 1865, urging young men and women to seek their luck in the ‘West.’ Echoing the promises of America itself, e.g., ‘progress,’ ‘adventure,’ ‘manifest destiny,’ ‘maturity,’ and ‘individualism,’ it conjured up an imagined region – a mythic ‘West’ – that has fascinated Americans from the early 19th century up to this day.
In this course, we will investigate the history of the ‘real territory’ (marked by the Indian wars and the everyday endeavor for survival in the frontier regions), but our main focus will be on the American West as an ‘imaginary construct.’ We will delve into the cultural, geographical, iconographic, and mythological background which delineates the West as ‘typically American,’ and explore a wide array of attributes of the imagined ‘West’ related to fields such as ‘gender’ (the ‘West’ as a place of masculinization), ‘social theory’ (the ‘West’ as the epitome of civilization), and ‘national identity’ (the ‘West’ as a stimulus of cultural belonging). Among the works to be discussed are several texts by renowned writers of the American West (Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Owen Wister), paintings (George Caleb Bingham, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Remington), movies (The Virginian, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and Brokeback Mountain), and other works on (or by) figures of popular mythology (Theodore Roosevelt, Daniel Boone, and Buffalo Bill).
Required Texts:
• A reader with primary and secondary texts will be made available at the beginning of the course.
