American Literature of the Southwest

University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Department of English Literary and Linguistic Studies

John Beck

American Literature of the Southwest

ELL345

Aims and Outcomes
Module Outline
Assessment
Week by Week
Reading and Resources
Links

Aims and Outcomes

Aims

To provide historical, geographical, political and cultural knowledge of the American Southwest
To place this knowledge within broader American and international contexts
To familiarise students with a range of texts produced in and about the American Southwest
To provide the means for discussing such writers, artists, and filmmakers from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives
To enable comparative critical analysis
To facilitate analysis of the relationship between cultural production and racial, ethnic, gender, class, and national identities

Intended Learning Outcomes

By the end of the module students should be conversant with the following:

issues pertaining to race, gender, and ethnicity in American writing
postcolonial issues of regional and national identity formation pertinent to discussion of the Americas
the role of literature in articulating political, cultural, and social arguments
current debates concerning the American literary canon
relationships between literature and environment

Intended Skills Outcomes

Able to assimilate information from a number of sources: fictional, visual, critical, theoretical
Able to critically compare and contrast different texts and contexts
Able to identify and explore issues of genre
Able to identify and explore issues relating to the social and political construction of texts
Able to exercise and develop a sensitivity to verbal creativity

Module Outline
American Literature of the Southwest is a 20 Credit module comprising of 13 lectures, a mock examination and 10 seminars. The module is assessed by 3 hour examination.

The Southwest referred to during this module is the region consisting of West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Southern California. The historical period covered during the module is 1848 -- present. Indigenous cultures, however, have existed in the Southwest for around 30,000 years and some Spanish and Mexican cultures have been around for around 400 years. These areas did not become part of the United States until after the Mexican-American War and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo by the US and Mexico in 1848. Under the treaty, Mexico ceded to the United States Upper California and New Mexico (including Arizona) and recognized U.S. claims over Texas, with the Rio Grande as its southern boundary. The United States paid Mexico $15,000,000, assumed the claims of American citizens against Mexico, recognized prior land grants in the Southwest, and offered citizenship to any Mexicans residing in the area.

This border constructed the US as it is today. The new territories of the US slowly became states: California in 1850, Nevada in 1864, Utah in 1896, Arizona and New Mexico in 1912. This border is of course an arbitrary division of the terrain. Issues surrounding the demarcation of spatial borders will feture strongly throughout the module.

The module can be divided chronologically into two sections:

The first half is concerned with the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century -- 'The Old West'
The second half is concerned with the post-World War Two period -- 'The New West '

From Old West to New West: some trajectories:

In politics: from marginalised region to (inter)national importance.
In economic terms: from preindustrial to postindustrial; from 'worthless' and 'empty' to rich and powerful.
In terms of racial identity: from Anglo dominance to cultural hybridity.
In terms of national identity: from Manifest Destiny to heterogeneous fragmentation; from enforcing the frontier thesis to trangressing borders.

These movements can be discussed in terms of, for example:

The construction of landscape
Representations of race, class and gender
Mythic structures of nation, identity, history

We will be tracking these issues through reading a variety of literary and visual texts.

The basic structure of the module is as follows:

Photography -- literature -- film -- photography -- literature

Early photographs of the region, made usually as part of federal and/or commercial surveys, served both to reveal the area to Americans in the East for the first time and established from the outset a conceptual matrix of aesthetic and political preoccupations that have continued to shape the idea of what the Southwest represents. Thus, these images are a good place to start. From here we will move on to examine non-fictional and fictional representations of the Southwest and its inhabitants (including Mark Twain, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather).

Film functions as a pivotal point in the module because the early development of the Western genre memorialises and celebrates the Old West using the technology of the twentieth century. Film thus frames and constructs the past, reproducing the mythology of the Old West that validates and affirms the national, racial and gender constructions that carry over into the attitudes and policies of the 20th century. We will study a 'classic' Hollywood western and then consider John Sayles' 'postmodern' western, Lone Star, a film that serves to introduce many of the issues we will explore in the second half of the module.

Contemporary landscape photography of the Southwest interrogates the legacy of 19th Century tropes in similar ways to Sayles' deconstruction of the western genre. We will conclude by considering important and influential works from contemporary Native American, Mexican American, and Anglo American writers.

Assessment

The module is assessed by a 3-hour examination.

You will be expected to answer 2 questions.
There will be 2 parts to the exam paper.

You will be expected to answer 1 question from Part One and 1 question from Part Two.
Part One will offer extracts from primary and secondary sources of approximately half a page in length. Each extract will be accompanied by a question.
You will choose one extract and answer the question with reference to the extract, drawing upon other texts and contexts from the module.
Part Two will be a straightforward list of questions from which you will choose 2. These will refer to the themes, texts, and contexts we will cover during the course of the module and you will be expected to draw upon at least 2 literary or cinematic texts for each question.
You should not use the same material in more than one question.

There will be a mock examination in the lecture slot during final week. You will answer one question. I will mark these and return the papers in the seminar where we can discuss issues relating to the exam.

Week by Week

Click on the headings below to go to lecture materials (outlines, quotations, further reading, links)

1	Introduction	Manifest Destiny; the Turner Thesis.
2	19th Century Visual Representations	The sublime; Surveying the West; Photography: terrain into landscape, the Civil War, the Great Surveys
3	Environmental Non-Fiction	*Clarence Dutton; John C. Van Dyke, The Desert* (1901); Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968); Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge. From the romantic sublime to technological terror.**
4	Twain	*Roughing It*
5	Austin	*The Land of Little Rain*
6	Cather	*Death Comes for the Archbishop*
7	The Western: Ford	Stagecoach; The Searchers. The importance of genre; the western as narrative of national self-becoming; representations of race and gender; John Ford's use of genre convention.
8	Lone Star	The Alamo; the New West as hybrid space; history, memory, and inheritance; issues of blood and power.
9	20th Century Visual Representations	The atomic West; the legacy of the 19th century; Robert Adams; Richard Misrach and the apocalyptic sublime.
10	Border Writing	2 pages: Conflict with Mexico and the Establishment of Southwestern States; Collision of cultures; assimilation and resistance.
11	Native American Fiction	*Ceremony; Eye Killers.*
12	Mexican American Fiction	Alburquerque; Bless Me, Ultima; Anzaldua.
13	Anglo American: Cormac McCarthy	*The Crossing.*
14	Mock Examination	The final lecture slot will be a one hour mock exam: you will answer ONE question. I will mark these and return the scripts to you with feedback.

Reading and Resources

Primary Texts

Mark Twain, Roughing It (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1872)
Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (New York: Dover, 1903)
Willa Cather, Death Comes For the Archbishop (London: Virago, 1927)
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Penguin, 1977)
A. A. Carr, Eye Killers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995)
Rudolfo Anaya, Alburquerque (New York: Warner, 1994)
Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (London: Picador, 1994)

General Links

These sites are excellent gateways to a wealth of material. Links specific to individual authors and topics are listed on the relevant pages.

Southwestern Literature Homepage
Excellent links to all manner of material relating to Southwestern Literature.
Westweb: Western History Resource
Excellent resource covering a range of topics, including photography, Native Americans, environment, politics and history, and so on.
Clements Center for Southwest Studies
A Literary History of the American West
Online version of the out of print edition sponsored by The Western Literature Association. Contains chapters on many of the writers studied, including Abbey, Austin, Cather, and so on, as well as thematic essays on numerous subjects. A useful introduction
New Perspectives on the West
Website accompanying the PBS series. Lots of useful material, including a really helpful timeline of events.

Books

Fiction

Abbey, Edward. The Monkey Wrench Gang (New York: Avon, 1992)

Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima (New York: Warner Books, 1972)

Carr, A.A. Eye Killers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995)

McCarthy, Cormac.Blood Meridian; or The Evening Redness in the West (London: Picador, 1985)

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses (London: Picador, 1992)

McCarthy, Cormac. Cities of the Plain (London: Picador, 1998)

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead (New York: Penguin Books, 1992)

Critical and Historical Studies
Critical works pertaining to specific authors are listed on the relevant pages

Anderson, Eric Gary. American Indian Literature and the Southwest: Contexts and Dispositions (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1999)

Campbell, Neil. The Cultures of the American New West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000)

Darder, Antonia and Rodolfo D. Torres, eds. The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy, and Society (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998)

Deutsch, Sarah. No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)

Fender, Stephen. Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)

Fernandez-Shaw, Carlos M. Presencia Espanola en los Estados Unidos / The Hispanic Presence in North America from 1492 to Today. Translated by Alfonso Bertodano Stourton and others (New York: Facts on File, 1991)

Gracia Jorge J.E. and Pablo De Greiff, eds., Hispanics/Latinos in the United States: Ethnicity, Race, and Rights (New York: Routledge, 2000)

Kolodny, Annette. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill & London, University of North Carolina Press, 1984)

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. Desert Passages: Encounters with the American Deserts (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985)

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987)

Milner II, Clyde A., Carol A. O'Connor, Martha A. Sandweiss, eds. The Oxford History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)

Moraga, Cherrie and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 2nd ed. (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983)

Norwood, Vera and Janice J. Monk, eds., The Desert is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women's Writing and Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987)

Nash, Roderick. American Environmentalism: Readings in Conservation History. 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990)

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000)

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York : Vintage Books, 1950). Click title for hypertext version.

Teague, David W. The Southwest in American Literature and Art: The Rise of a Desert Aesthetic (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1997)

Wild, Peter, ed., The Desert Reader: Descriptions of America’s Arid Regions (Salt Lake City. UT: University of Utah Press, 1991)

Wild, Peter. The Opal Desert: Explorations of Fantasy and Reality in the American Southwest (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1999)

Zamora, Lois Parkinson. The Usable Past: the Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

John Beck, Department of English literary and Linguistic Studies, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU. J.M.Beck@ncl.ac.uk

Other Modules
ELL326 Contemporary American Fiction
ELL339 Postwar American Poetry