"Never ain't here yet": The Western, a National Art Form-ZIP

elective courses
elective monographs

This course is offered within the University of Warsaw Integrated Development Programme, co-financed from the European Social Fund under the Operational Programme Knowledge Education Development 2014-2020, path 3.5.

Understanding the American West and the cultural production it has spawned—chiefly the Western as a genre and its rhizomatic spores—are of paramount importance to developing at a holistic appreciation of the multifaceted fabric that is the United States. In many ways, the West had always been imagined first, meaning different things to different people, only to be re-imagined over and over again as these imaginings came up against geographic and historical realities. It is difficult to overestimate the importance and influence that the Western has had in this process.

If there ever was a quintessentially American genre, the Western undoubtedly occupies a preeminent position in American storytelling tradition. Consequently, it is rather difficult to understand American culture and identity without critically appraising and appreciating the imagined Wests of the Western and the mythological power the genre has held not only over the imagination and self-perception of Americans, but also over the global perception of the United States as a country of “cowboys and Indians.” The West as imagined by and in the Western has periodically surfaced to serve as both figurative arena as well as an allegorical canvas for Americans to think through and work out unresolved and/or unresolvable challenges that beset the nation. Consequently, the West(ern) is wedded to crises, functioning either as a coping mechanism to deal with crises or as an indicator for crises. Since 9/11, for example, popular cultural production across media is replete with potent and pertinent examples. These include but are not limited to mainstream fare such as the hit TV series Deadwood (2004-06) and Hell on Wheels (2011-16), writer/director Taylor Sheridan’s collective film and television oeuvre (e.g. Yellowstone, 2018–; Hell and High Water, 2016), and blockbuster video games like Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar, 2010) and Red Dead Redemption II (Rockstar, 2018).

The recent and ongoing resurgence of Westerns and Western tropes especially on television, coupled with the rise of the Yeehaw agenda, which seeks to reinsert marginalized discourses into what had long been an exclusively white, hyper-masculine, indeed, chauvinistic mythos, will serve as starting points for this class as we will first locate the multifaceted roots of the Western as a genre and then chart its evolution across different media. This will include but is not limited to the i) colonial precursors of Western archetypes and formulas, the coalescence of the ii) genre Western in Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) as a reaction to the closing of the “frontier,” the iii) long Golden Age of the Western in Hollywood, and the genre’s iv) subsequent permutations, ranging from the social justice Western, the Anti-Western, the Spaghetti Western to the Acid Western, the Revisionist Western, and more. While the demise of the Western has been hailed many times, it has yet to be put out to pasture. Conceived as a swan song to a West that never really was, the Western puts forth a mythopoetic Neverland which provides firm ideological anchoring, safety, and reaffirmation for both the nation and individuals. Consequently, we can observe a periodical return to the West of the Western, or elements there of either during or right after periods of heightened national crisis and angst.

Aquila, Richard. ed. 1998. Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Aquila, Richard. 2015. The Sagebrush Trail: Western Movies and Twentieth-Century America. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Bandy, Mary L. and Kevin Stoehr. 2012. Ride, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the American Western. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Boggs, Johnny D. 2020. The American West on Film. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.

Britz, Kevin and Roger L. Nichols. 2018. Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City: Re-Creating the Frontier West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Campbell, Neil. 2008. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Campbell, Neil. 2013. Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Marill, Alvin H. 2011. Television Westerns: Six Decades of Sagebrush Sheriffs, Scalawags, and Sidewinders. Lanham: Scarecrow Press.

McVeigh, Stephen. 2007. The American Western. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.

Turner, Ralph L. and Robert J. Higgs. 1999. The Cowboy Way: The Western Leader in Film, 1945-1995. Westport: Greenwood Press.

Students will walk away from the class having (co)developed a firm understanding of the historical contexts as well as the narratological substance that undergird America’s national art form with an added view to appreciating its global relevance and effects. By engaging with the production and representation of cultural meaning in (popular) media artifacts, students will be challenged to (re)develop and subsequently practice competences needed to maintain high levels of historical as well as historiographic literacy, intercultural proficiency, and critical (trans)media literacy.

Be prepared to critically formulate, present & discuss your own (!) thoughts about the many facets of the popular culture West since a large part of this class will depend on your concerted input. This class is an interactive and peer-created (!) course and thus students will be expected to engage in self-directed research and to handle different media texts. All of the material you will need to get you started will be provided in digital form.

Media studies class mode: dynamic, multimedia lecture input, group discussions/activities, reading/viewing assignments, student presentations and interaction, peer-feedback, peer-editing

IN-CLASS:

1) Regular attendance, participation, weekly mini-readings/viewings (15%)

2) A ‘Remediating the West’ explicator talk (20%)

3) A ‘Virtual Campfire’ peer-hosted/film-based session takeover (30%)

WRITTEN:

4) Explicator talk one sheet (10%)

5) A thesis-driven final reflection project (25%) [format to be announced]