2015-2016 academic year

English Literature Studies (20098)

Degree/Study: Degree in Humanities 

Year: 3rd- 4th
Term: 1st
Number of ECTS credits: 5 credits
Hours of student dedication:
Teaching language or languages: ENGLISH
Teaching Staff: Maria Antònia Oliver

Important note to students: This syllabus is tentative and may be subject to changes. The themes will remain similar to the ones outline below. However, the literary works assigned may change. The definitive syllabus will be posted in Aula Global at the beginning of the second term.

 

1. Presentation of the subject

This course will explore the literary representation of the American frontier from the colonial period to the present. Bearing in mind that the frontier still remains one of the most powerful myths in the collective consciousness of many Americans, this course will examine how literature has contributed, on the one hand, to the emergence and prevalence of this myth, and, on the other hand, to its critique. The texts discussed will encompass some of the recurrent topics in frontier literature: the East-West dichotomy, the representation of Native Americans and women on the frontier, the myth of the cowboy, frontier violence and individualism, the ideological uses of the American landscape, and the challenges to the frontier myth in the literature by women, Native Americans and Chicanos. After analyzing several representative works (including the films "The Searchers" and "Brokeback Mountain"), by the end of the course students will be able to identify the main traits associated with this type of literature, to notice the distinction between the myth and reality of frontier life, and to evaluate its ongoing significance in contemporary America and, more specifically, how it has become such an important element for building and redefining an American identity.

2. Competences to be attained

General competences

Specific competences

 

1.    Instrumental skills

  1. Arguing, that is to say, defending or justifying a certain position in written and in speech.
  2. Having deductive reasoning skills, that is, reaching a conclusion from a series of premises.
  3. Generalising, or extracting a general norm from a limited amount of data or examples.
  4. Transmitting, in written and in oral speech, and in a well organised fashion, the acquired knowledge.
  5. Analysing and synthesising information taken from a variety of sources.
  6. Organising and planning academic work.
  7. Using previous knowledge in any learning activity.
  8. Applying theory to practice.

2.    Interpersonal skills

  1. Group work and meaning negotiation skills.
  2. Individual work skills.
  3. Integrating group work in the autonomous work.
  4. Communicating interpersonally in a small and in a big group.

3.    Systemic skills

  1. Creativity.
  2. Self-learning and continued learning skills.

 

1.    Knowing, situating and interpreting relevant examples of frontier literature written by canonical American authors.

2.    Analysing the evolution of the linguistic and thematic registers from the Puritans to the 21st century

3.    Contextualizing the evolution of frontier literature in relation to the main trends of American literature and understanding the transition from a colonial to a national literature.

4.    Knowing and analysing the evolution of the narrative strategies of the most significant authors.

5.    Rewriting and creatively recreating some of the texts studied in the course.

6.    Knowing the most significant theories on the American Frontier so as to be able to propose sound interpretations of the texts.

 

 

3. Contents

UNIT 1. One or Many? Theorizing and Defining the American Frontier.

Comparing and contrasting related terms: frontier, border, borderlands, frontera. The frontier in modern American political discourse. From the "Turner Thesis" to Slotkin's "Regeneration through violence". Theories challenging the Frontier: from the Frontier to the Borderlands.

UNIT 2. Captives, Indians, Settlers: Early American Frontier Literature

Representations of the frontier in colonial American literature. The "captivity narrative" as a frontier literary genre: Mary Rowlandon. Crevecoeur's Letters. American Romanticism and its views on the frontier. James Fenimore Cooper.

UNIT 3. Poetry and the Discourse of Westward Expansion.

The poetical representation of the frontier in the early national period: Philip Freneau. Poetry and Romanticism: Bryant and the fireside poets. Whitman and "Manifest Destiny".

UNIT 4. On the Trail: Travel Writing and the Frontier Experience

The main routes of westward exploration. Wagon trains versus cattle drives. The transcontinental railroad. The epic discourse of westward exploration. Twain and the satirical exploration of the journey to the West.

UNIT 5. Folk Heroes: the Frontier and Popular Literature

Naturalism, realism and the "official" closing of the frontier. Dime novels and pulp stories: the emergence of the western as popular fiction.

UNIT 6. The Hollywood Frontier: the Western

From silent movies to blockbusters: the celluloid-driven globalization of cowboy stories. A close analysis at John Ford's The Searchers. Its relation to frontier literature and the captivity narrative tradition.

UNIT 7. The Female Experience of the Frontier in American Literature

Cather, My Ántonia (book I, excerpts) Cather, My Ántonia (books II-V, excerpts). The frontier myth and gender roles. Male and female perceptions of landscape.

UNIT 8. Challenging the Frontier I

1. Theories challenging the Frontier: From the Frontier to the Borderlands: Excerpts from Annette Kolodny's "Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions"; Excerpts from Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera.

2. Native American Literature: Leslie Marmon Silko, "A Geronimo Story."

UNIT 9. Literature Challenging the Frontier II: The Border Came to Us": Hispanic Literature in the US.

John Francis Bannon, The Spanish Borderlands Frontier; Américo Paredes, "The Country" (from With His Pistol in his Hand); "Corrido de Gregorio Cortez" (anonymous). Américo Paredes, "The Gringo"; Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, We Fed them Cactus (excerpts xi-xii; 1-16; 39-50; 138-153; 171-178 ) Jane Juffer, Introduction to "The Last Frontier: Contemporary Configurations of the U.S.-Mexico Border"; Paul S. Flores, Along the Border Lies (excerpt). Film: John Sayles' Lone Star .

UNIT 10. Re-imagining Frontier Masculinity: Literature and the "new" Western.

Annie Proulx, "Brokeback Mountain" Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain": The 1960s cowboy culture; landscape, psychological oppression and heterosexual normativity.

 

 

4. Evaluation

All students must write two papers in English for this course, one for each teacher, and each of these works will make up to 15% of the final grade. The theme and the instructions for each assignment will be given either in class or posted at the Aula Global. There will also be a mandatory final exam for everyone (equivalent to 60% of the final mark) plus a participation grade (equivalent to 10% of the final grade).

5. Bibliography and Resources

5.1. Basic Bibliography

Coursepack and Course website

 

5.2. Additional Bibliography

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.

Bartlett, Richard. The New Country: A Social History of the American Frontier, 1776-1890. New York: Oxford UP, l974.

Benito, Jesús and Ana Manzanas. Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands. Amsterdam & New York, 2002.

Billington, Ray Allen. The Frontier and American Culture. Berkeley: California Library Association, 1965.

- - - and Martin Ridge. Westward Expansion : a History of the American Frontier. New York: Macmillan, 1982.

Bradbury, Malcolm, and H. Temperley. Introduction to American Studies. New York: Longman, 1981.

Calderón, Héctor, and José David Saldívar, eds. Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies on Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1991.

Fussell, Edwin S. Frontier: American Literature and the American West. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965.

Grossman, James R. (ed.). The Frontier in American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Hazard, Lucy L. The Frontier in American Literature. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1941.

Heyne, Eric (ed.). Desert, Garden, Margin, Range: Literature on the American Frontier. Boston: Twayne, 1992.

Kittredge, William (ed.). The Portable Western Reader. New York: Viking, 1997.

Kolodny: Annette, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1830-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.

Lyons, Greg (ed.) Literature of the American West. A Cultural Approach. New York: Longman, 2003.

McWilliams, Carey. North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968.

Mogen, David, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant (eds.). The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1989.

Saldívar, José David. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: California UP, 1997.

Slotkin, Richard, Regeneration through Violence. The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, l973.

- - - . The Fatal Environment: the Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. New York: Atheneum, 1985.

- - - . Gunfighter Nation. The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: the American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1950.

Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. The Encyclopedia of Frontier Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Sullivan, Tom R. Cowboys and Caudillos: Frontier Ideology of the Americas. Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1990.

Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything. The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. Malabar, Florida: Krieger, 1985.

Westfahl, Gary. Space and Beyond: the Frontier Theme in Science Fiction. Westport, Greenwood, 2000.

 

5.3. Teaching Resources

Web with course resources available at: http://www.upf.edu/materials/fhuma/frontier/

 

6. Methodology (optional)

This course is taught in English and follows a communicative methodology that places emphasis on reading comprehension, listening comprehension, and writing. For this reason it is essential that the students enrolled in the course have a good command of English and have achieved at least level B1 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages​​. It is also important that students read and prepare all the texts in the course well in advance, given the complexity and length that they may have sometimes. The approach to the course, though based mainly on texts, will be multidisciplinary and therefore will make forays into the fields of cinema and painting.

 

7. Course Schedule

 

STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE (20098)

  

 

Tuesdays

Thursdays

26/09

 

 

 

Introduction. Political rhetoric and definitions of the Frontier

 

1/10 - 3/10

 

 

 

Discussion of Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis" and of Richard Slotkin's views on the frontier myth

 

The construction of the frontier in the Puritan period: "the errand into the wilderness"

 

 

8/10 - 10/10

 

 

Analysis of Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative

 

 

Frontier and nation-building during the early Republic: Crevecoeur's Letters and poetry by Philip Freneau

 

 

15/10 - 17/10

 

 

 

The Romantic construction of the frontier: James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans

 

Poetry, Western expansionism and Manifest Destiny: poetry by Walt Whitman and William Cullen Bryant.

 

22/10 - 24/10

 

 

 

Frontier Humour and Frontier Travel: analysis of several chapters from Mark Twain's Roughing It

 

 

The Hollywood Western and the modern recasting of the American Frontier: John Ford's The Searchers

 

 

29/10 - 31/10

 

First hour: Pere Gifra. The literary western and the symbolic construction of the frontier: analysis of Stephen Crane's short story "The Bride Came to Yellow Sky"

 

Second Hour: M. Antònia Oliver

Introduction to the second part of the course.

Women and the Frontier: Excerpts from My Antonia (book I)

 

 

Women and the Frontier: My Ántonia (book I)

 

5/11 - 7/11

 

 

 

Women and the Frontier: My Ántonia (books II-V)

 

 

Challenging the Frontier: new concepts, paradigms and theories (essays by Kolodny and Gloria Anzaldúa).

 

Native Americans and the Frontier:  Leslie M. Silko's "A Geronimo Story" 

 

12/11 - 14/11

 

Native Americans and the Frontier:  Leslie M. Silko's "A Geronimo Story"

 

 Louise Erdrich's "Dear John Wayne"

 

The Border Came to Us: Hispanics in the Borderlands.

 

John Francis Bannon, The Spanish Borderlands Frontier

Américo Paredes, "The Country" (from With His Pistol in his Hand); "Corrido de Gregorio Cortez" (anonymous). Américo Paredes, "The Gringo"; Film: John Sayles' Lone Star .

 

19/11 - 21/11

 

 

Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, We Fed them Cactus (excerpts xi-xii; 1-16; 39-50; 138-153; 171-178 )

Jane Juffer, Introduction to "The Last Frontier: Contemporary Configurations of the U.S.-Mexico Border"; Paul S. Flores, Along the Border Lies (excerpt).

 

 

26/11 - 28/11

 

 

New views of the frontier: Annie Proulx, "Brokeback Mountain"

 

New views of the frontier: Annie Proulx, "Brokeback Mountain"

 

03/12

 

 

Joint session with guest lecturer to be announced, Pere Gifra and M. Antònia Oliver.

Course wrap up and conclusions.