ENG 280 - Mystery and Romance of the West

Although we start with one, this is not a course on the Western. It is a course that concentrates on the West as place, space, idea, and feeling in American literature.  Variously conceived as wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men, a source of immense wealth for the intrepid and the lucky, a site teeming with souls in need of saving as well as opportunities to re-acquire or at least claim to re-acquire innocence, a region where “the dead are not powerless,” a place of rest for the persecuted, the almost metaphysical realm of USA’s Manifest Destiny and the rapacious engine of that destiny, the West, for all its conflicts, is still a landscape of imagination, still a  millennial promise of new physical and spiritual horizons.  The task of this course is to unravel from the larger cultural and historical context the streams of verbal and visual rhetoric by which the West sparked and may still fuel the dreams of such mystery and romance.

The pedagogical methods I intend to use are designed to provide experience in several critical approaches to reading: they include the intensive study of (1) works by canonical writers (along with the attendant problematics of canon formation), (2) major periods of literary history and the question of periodization,  (3) the development of literary types (both characters and genres) as well as (4) the impact of race, sexuality, and gender on the creation and reception of literary works.  While the course does examine constructions of race, gender, self, and nature/wilderness/frontier in the literature of the West, it also gives equal time to moments and events when such constructions are tested and even neutralized. The thematic bridges are evident from the metaphors structuring the subdivisions of the course, but the nuts and bolts are:   (1) Europe’s invention of America  before its actual discovery and the consequences of that invention’s use in national(ist) mythology that accompanied or underwrote various strands of Westward expansion;  (2) racial conflicts created by that expansion;  (3) the  “female” West and the problems of isolated masculinity (“A man’s gotto know his limitations”);  (4) Western humor, especially that of the Southwest;  (5)  the persistence of the motif of regeneration through violence.

Satisfies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.
Satisfies the Historical Approaches requirement of the English major.