Academic Year:
2022/23
3353 - Bachelor's degree in Humanities
23421 - Studies in English Literature
Teaching Plan Information
Academic Course:
2022/23
Academic Center:
335 - Faculty of Humanities
Study:
3353 - Bachelor's degree in Humanities
Subject:
23421 - Studies in English Literature
Ambit:
---
Credits:
4.0
Course:
4 and 3
Teaching languages:
| Theory: | Group 1: English |
| Seminar: | Group 101: English |
| Group 102: English |
Teachers:
Pere Gifra Adroher
Teaching Period:
Second quarter
Schedule:
Presentation
Studies in English Literature: "The Frontier in American Literature and History"
This course will explore the literary representation of the American frontier from the colonial period to the present. Bearing in mind that the frontier 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.
Associated 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 to be able to propose sound interpretations of the texts.
Learning outcomes
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 an essential element for building and redefining an American identity.
Sustainable Development Goals
#Quality Education
#Gender Education
#Climate Action
Prerequisites
This is a demanding course not suitable to students with a poor command of English. It is essential that the students enrolled in the course have a good command of English and have achieved at least a solid level B1 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Classes are held in English and all the course tasks, including the final exam, must be written in English as well.
Students are expected to read and prepare many of the texts in the course well in advance, given the complexity and length that they may have sometimes. Most of the texts will be posted in the Aula Global. Students are particularly expected to read Willa Cather’s novel My Antonia and watch the following two films: John Ford’s The Searchers and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. It is a good idea to look for them before the term starts.
Contents
PART I: CLASSICAL VIEWS OF THE FRONTIER
UNIT 1. One or Many? Theorizing and Defining the American Frontier. Related terms: frontier, landscape, myth narrative, fantasy, ideology. The frontier in modern American political discourse. From the “Turner Thesis” to Slotkin’s “Regeneration through violence”.
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. The poetical representation of the frontier in the early national period: Philip Freneau.
UNIT 3. Romanticism and the frontier. The Discourse of Westward Expansion. James Fenimore Cooper. Poetry and Romanticism: Bryant and the fireside poets. Whitman and “Manifest Destiny”.
UNIT 4. Unsettling the myth of the journey west: Humour and the closing of the frontier. The main routes of westward exploration. The transcontinental railroad. Mark Twain and the satire of the journey west. Stephen Crane and the closing of the frontier.
UNIT 5. 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.
PART II: CHALLENGING THE FRONTIER
UNIT 6. The theoretical challenge to the Frontier and women’s experience. Annette Kolodny’s rethinking of literary history. The Female Experience of the Frontier from Willa Cather’s perspective My Antonia. The frontier myth and gender roles. Male and female perceptions of landscape.
UNIT 7: The Native American challenge: William Apess, Leslie Marmon Silko, “A Geronimo Story” Louise Erdrich “Dear John Wayne.”
UNIT 8: The Hispanic/Latin@ challenge. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (excerpts). The revised post-modern Western: John Sayles’ Lone Star
UNIT 9. Re-imagining Frontier Masculinity: Literature and the queering of the Western. Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain”. Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain”: The 1960s cowboy culture; landscape, psychological oppression, and heterosexual normativity.
Important note to students: This course program is tentative and may be subject to changes. The units will remain similar to the ones outlined here. However, the literary Works/authors assigned may change. The definitive syllabus will be posted in the Aula Global at the beginning of the term.
Teaching Methods
--Students are expected to attend classes and actively participate in class discussions and online forums. You need not justify occasional absences; just make sure you keep yourself updated on what has been done in class.
--Each students will have to give a brief oral presentation on one of the texts discussed in class. Students should look at the presentation calendar on the first day and make sure they are ready to present on the date assigned to them.
--Students also have the obligation to keep up with the program and contents of the Aula Global, as the schedule may change slightly, as well as with any notifications posted by their instructor.
Evaluation
The evaluation of the course is as follows
--In-class and forum participation: 20%
--A final creative project or academic paper: 30%
--A final exam: 50%
To pass the subject students must get a minimum of 5 in the final exam. Students who fail the final exam will have a make-up exam during the following quarter. Those students who fail the project will have the opportunity to revise it and resubmit it during the following quarter by the deadline provided by the instructor. Please look at the official exam calendar before making any holiday or travel plans. Make-up exams will only be given in very exceptional cases, and never in case of holiday or travel plans.
Bibliography and information resources
All of the course materials will be posted on the Aula Global or will be provided in class by the instructor. Moreover, a comprehensive bibliography of the subject will be provided at the beginning of the course. The books provided here are for general reference only.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.
Billington, Ray Allen. The Frontier and American Culture. Berkeley: California Library Association, 1965.
Billington, Ray Allen & Martin Ridge. Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier. 6th. Ed. Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.
Blanding, Paul J., Jon Tuska & Vicki Piekarski (eds.) The Frontier Experience: A Reader’s Guide to the Life
and Literature of the American West. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1984.
Folsom, James K. The American Western Novel. New Haven: College & University Press, 1966.
Fussell, Edwin S. Frontier: American Literature and the American West. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965.
Georgi-Findlay, Brigitte. The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women’s Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996.
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.
Hine, Robert V. & John M. Faragher. Frontiers. A Short History of the American West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
Heyne, Eric (ed.). Desert, Garden, Margin, Range: Literature on the American Frontier. Boston: Twayne, 1992.
Klose, Nelson. A Concise Study Guide to the American Frontier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964.
Kolodny: Annette. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
Kowalewski, Michael. Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Lyon, Thomas L. (ed.). The Literary West: An Anthology of Western American Literature. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Lyons, Greg (ed.) Literature of the American West. A Cultural Approach. New York: Longman, 2003.
Milton, John R. The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980.
Mogen, David, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant (eds.). The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989.
Proulx, Annie. Close Range: Wyoming Stories. New York: Scribner, 1999.
Robinson, Cecil. With the Ears of Strangers: The Mexican in American Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1963.
Simonson, Harold P. Beyond the Frontier: Writers, Western Regionalism, and a Sense of Place. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1989.
Slotkin, Richard, Regeneration through Violence. The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 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 University Press, 1950.
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. The Encyclopedia of Frontier Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. Florida: Krieger, 1985.
White, Richard. A New History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
Worster, Donald. Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.