English 178 - Fall, 2020

Topics in Nations, Regions, & Other Cultural Geographies

Class Information

Instructor: Wander, Ryan
CRN: 32156
Time: TR 1:40-3:00
GE Areas: Writing Experience

Description

While the precise geographical contours of the American West have shifted over the course of the nation's history, for many of us the region's well-worn tropes probably seem quite a bit less labile than its shifting physical boundaries. Cowboys and "Indians," wide-open frontier spaces and vigilante justice, and a certain kind of toxic masculinity are, for many of us, familiar features of the landscape. Perhaps less familiar are narratives that give aesthetic form to subjects, subjectivities, and spaces that those familiar foci of representation crowd out, such as working-class utopias, persecuted Mormons, racialized migrants, bachelor communities, subtly subversive performances of gender, and Orientalist anxieties. This course covers both the well-worn and the less familiar in order to examine the heterogeneous ways in which authors and artists have represented the region, and to consider the relation between these representations and the interests, desires, and social and economic conditions that have shaped the American West over time. Alongside materials including pulp Westerns, regional writing, immigrant fiction, and a range of visual representations of the region, we will read scholarship conducive to theoretical, historicized understandings of literary and artistic production in and about the American West.

Grading

Your final grade will be based on the following work:

Essay 1: 20%
Essay 2: 25%
Final Exam: 25%
Annotated Bibliography Assignment: 10%
Quizzes, Participation, Short Writing Exercises, and Other Activities (details forthcoming): 20%

Texts

Deadwood Dick, the Prince of the Road, Edward Wheeler
Under the Feet of Jesus, Helena Mar?a Viramontes
Riders of the Purple Sage, Zane Grey
"The Luck of Roaring Camp" and other selected stories, Bret Harte
Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, Ann Stephens
"The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains", Maxine Hong Kingston
WHEREAS, Layli Long Soldier
Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Sui Sin Far
McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, Frank Norris
If He Hollers Let Him Go, Chester Himes
Additional readings, available via Canvas, tba in first lecture