Curs 2009-2010

Llicenciatura en Humanitats  

Literatura Anglesa A (11586)  

 

The Frontier in American Literature and Culture.

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 deconstruction. The texts discussed 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, etc. The authors to be discussed are Mary Rowlandson, James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Leslie Marmon Silko Annie Proulx and Gloria Anzaldúa, among many others. The course also includes the analysis of the films "The Searchers" by John Ford and "Brokeback Mountain" by Ang Lee.

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

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

UNIT 3. On the Trail: Travel Writing and the Frontier Experience

UNIT 4. Poetry and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion

UNIT 5. The Hollywood Frontier: the Western

UNIT 6. Realism, Naturalism, and the Closing of the Frontier

UNIT 7. The Frontier Woman in American Literature

UNIT 8. Native American Literature: Challenging the Frontier

UNIT 9. The Borderlands and Chicano/a Literature

UNIT 10. New Frontiers: Representations in Contemporary American Culture