English 380:  The Mystery and Romance of the West

Dr. Kuzmanovich
Chambers 310 B; 892 2237
Office Hours: MWF 1:30-2:30; TR 11:15-12:00
zokuzmanovic@davidson.edu







DESCRIPTION: Designed primarily for English majors who prefer to ground or extend their knowledge of American literature through thematic, theoretical, and genre-oriented courses rather than surveys. This course may be taken instead of English 280.

BACKGROUND: 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 major 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.

TEXTS:
 

  •             Paul Lauter, gen. ed., The Heath Anthology of American Literature3rd Ed. Vol 1.
  •             Theda Perdue, "Cherokee Women and the Trail of Tears" (On Reserve)
  •             Mark Twain, Roughing It
  •           Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson
  •           F.J. Turner,  "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" E-text
  •             B. Traven, Treasure of the Sierra Madre
  •             Jack London, The Sea-Wolf
  •             Jack London, "Love of Life"  E-text
  •           Willa Cather,  My Antonia
  •             Thomas Berger, Little Big Man
  •             Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
  •           Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine
  •             Bret Harte, "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" (On Reserve)
  •             Stephen Crane, "The Blue Hotel"  E-Text
  •             Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Ballantine--0-345-40447-5)

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    Recommended Texts:   Hondo; The Ox-Bow Incident; Lillian Schlissel, Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey; Jane Tompkins, West of Everything;  John Cawlety, The Six-Gun Mystique; Cooper, The Prairie; Last of the Mohicans; DuBois, Ellen Carol and Vicki L Ruiz, eds., Unequal Sisters (in the Library on Reserve)
     

    Recommended Films:   Shane, High Noon, Stagecoach, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Searchers, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,  Thelma and Louise, The Unforgiven, Cadillac Desert, 1000 Pieces of Gold

    REQUIREMENTS: Once we are safely beyond the hefty clutches of the Heath Anthology, each student will be required to act as the "facilitator" of discussion during one class meeting. While I will usually  provide the necessary biographical and historical context, the facilitators/discussion leaders will generate,  defend and broadcast their interpretation of the work at hand.   Discussion leaders should meet with me two class periods ahead of the one they are scheduled to facilitate, and they should have finished the reading by the time they meet with me.  The Journal/Discussion/Quiz grade will account for 25% of the final grade. For the constitutionally quiet, the discussion grade may be improved though an optional journal on a topic selected in consultation with me. There will be also be a mid-term exam (20%), a seven-to-ten page research paper (25%), and the final exam (30%).

    JOURNAL:  I would like five thoughtful and exquisitely crafted two-page journals distributed in the following fashion:  Three answering some of the questions I've asked on the syllabus; one on a (Western) theme, place, person, and event such as the ones mentioned bellow but certainly not limited to them; one analysis of what you take to be the most memorable moment in a western film.  (Supply me with the videotape of the film if I do not have it.)  The journals can be handed in on any five out of the eightJournal Due days. They can be handed in on either Tuesday or Thursday by 5:00  A few words of caution:  Journals written the night before usually show it.  The ones written on the due day not only show it but are often a waste of time.  I am serious about the two-page format: line spacing should be nothing narrower than 2, and  the fonts should never be smaller than 12-point. Please have mercy on my failing eyes.

    DISCUSSION AND JOURNAL TOPICS:

    Calendar:

    Part I:  Origins
    [The West] is a dream. It is what people who have come here from the beginning of time have  dreamed. It's a dream landscape. To the Native American, it's full of sacred realities,  powerful things. It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And as I say on  occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen. The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High -- the Sacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere -- its roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens, and its congregation an Union of many Republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling, owning no man master, but governed by God's natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood -- of "peace and good will amongst men.". . .

                                                                                                                John L. O'Sullivan on Manifest Destiny, 1839
     

    From The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 3/e:

    T 1/12 Introduction
    R 1/14 Read the following  and e-mail me the ones you'd like to discuss::

    1. Native American Oral Literatures
    2. Native American Oral Poetry
  • M 1/18    Observance of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
  • W 1/20
    • F 1/22 T 1/26    Journal Due:  Your reaction to the Puritan handling  of either Morton or Hutchinson.  What is really at stake? Taken in its whole, [the North American Continent] is a wonderful provision for the intelligence, sagacity, energy, restlessness, and indomitable will of such a race as the Anglo-Saxon--a race that masters physical nature without being mastered by it--a race in which the intensest home-feelings combine with a love of enterprise, advent, and colonization--a race that fears nothing, claims everything within reach, enjoys the future more than the present, and believes in a destiny of incomparable and immeasurable grandeur. R 1/28 T 2/2 R 2/4   Journal Due: Write on A or B. (A) Is de Crèvecoeur's image of the melting pot still appropriate?
    (B) What are the commonalities among  the Rowlandson, Williams, and Hammon captivity narratives?  What are the most important differences? T 2/9 R 2/11    Visit by Professor Wendy Steiner

    T 2/16

    R 2/18 T 2/23  Journal Due:  Write on either A or B.  (A) What  roles (if any) did Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman have in underwriting the Western Expansion?  (B) Are the dominant contemporary views of the Native Americans gendered? R 2/25    Mid-term Review
    Have a good safe break, but get going on Roughing It
  • T 3/8
  • R 3/11
  • T 3/16
  • R 3/18
  • T 3/23 & R 3/25    Journal Due
  • T 3/30 & R 4/1    Journal Due
    • Part IV:  Re-interpretation
    I think that the West is the most powerful reality in the history of this country. It's always had a power, a presence, an attraction that differentiated it from the rest of the United States. Whether the West was a place to be conquered, or the West as it is today, a place to be protected and nurtured[, it ] is the regenerative force of America.
                                                                                       J. S. Holliday
     
  • R 4/8 & T 4/13   Journal Due; Paper Proposal Due
  •  R 4/15  Start Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
  • T 4/20
  • R 4/22 & T 4/27  Final Journal Due:  Has the West maintained its hold on the American imagination? If so,  how so; if not, why not? Has anything replaced it?
  • R 4/29 and T 5/4
  • T 5/5   Paper Due
    • A FEW WORDS ON GRADING

    Although all grading is to some degree subjective, I want to clue you in on what my particular criteria are. I am convinced that written assignments help you to develop and clarify your understanding of a text, thus giving you a firmer grasp of it than reading, lecture, or discussion can provide. What I look for in your writing are the following elements. Words like sense and feeling hint at the subjectivity; remember, however, that I am a trained reader and that these criteria are constants for everyone in this class. NB: I am distressed and irritated by carelessness in handling of logic, grammar, and textual evidence, and, as a result, every time I have to correct something, your grade is affected accordingly. For me, teaching provides a type of satisfaction no other activity can provide, so I care about all aspects of it, including your writing. I hope you will care about it as much as I do. I applaud good intentions, encourage aspiration, and value hard work, but I reward only achievement.

    LETTERS AND NUMBERS: Letter grades will be converted to numerical ones according to the following scale:

    A = 95; A- = 92; B+ = 88; B = 85; B- = 82; C+ = 78; C = 75; C- = 72; D+ = 68; D = 65.