TOPICS IN THE LITERATURES OF AMERICAN CULTURES

In this course we will examine the development of “the West” as a historical and literary concept. We will investigate its role in the creation of American identities and as a space in which those identities may be contested and refigured. We will begin with Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous “frontier thesis.” The emptiness of the western frontier, argued Turner, was responsible for fostering the sense of individual responsibility that is at the core of American democracy. We will read Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop as a complicated rewriting of the West as the territory of self and national formation. Death Comes illustrates the ways in which the West has been configured as the productive place in which people of European descent become Americans. Unlike Turner, Cather does not empty the West of non-White peoples. She does, however, minimize the conflict that underwrote Western expansion. The effects of that historical process are at the heart of D’Arcy McNickle’s Wind from an Enemy Sky. McNickle’s novel is keenly interested in the effects of colonial subjugation on surviving native communities.

The legacies of historical violence, McNickle suggests, continue to shape the lives of Native Americans. Just as conquest created Native America as we know it so too did it create the analogous place of Chicanos and Mexican-Americans as subjects that have been incorporated as external to the nation-state that is their home. Ramón Saldívar’s The Borderlands of Culture, Américo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez, and Helena Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus, one a critical/theoretical work, the other two novels, explore the meaning of the border on people of Mexican descent and on the very fabric of American culture. In the last section of the course we will turn to the history and aesthetics of violence as it relates to the West. Violence, Richard Slotkin argues in Regeneration Through Violence, is not just an Indian or a Mexican problem. Rather, he maintains, violence is one of the spiritual sources of American national identity broadly conceived. The western frontier has been conquered through violence and that violence, at once disavowed and sublimated, remains a determining feature of Americans’ vision of themselves. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is a profound and aesthetically dense meditation on the role of frontier violence on American culture. Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead is another. Almanac refuses to recognize any of the national borders that cut through the West as violent colonial inventions. The West, this course maintains, has a privileged position in the imaginary geography of U.S. nationalism. It has often been configured as the open space of possibility, the place where pure individualism has had the space to explore its limits. But this imaginary geography as the course’s readings will show has just as often come in conflict with the historical West as a colonized territory that continues to be contested by Native Americans, Mexicans, Latinos, and Anglos.