Course description
“Framing the American West” will provide students with critical and historical tools to apprehend and analyze the aesthetic and political construction of the American West and its influence on U.S. and global cultures. We will examine classic literary and non-literary texts at the heart of the mythology of the American West and combine these reading with the analysis of classic Western movies. This class will thus explore the transatlantic exchanges originating in the aesthetic and political formations of the American West. Notions such as the “frontier,” “the right to bear arms,” or the self-made man in a new territory, not to speak of the “Marlboro cowboy” will require our attention. These notions have largely contributed to the exportation of the “American dream” that has driven part of the world economy and the appeal to emigrate to America. We shall see how the American West has contributed to the appeal of America but also to fuelling anti-American sentiments. This class is therefore an example of what may call the “internationalization of American studies” which aim at understanding how American culture has functioned as a major actor for other world cultures.
Western movies are a fascinating object of study where cultural and political can be observed. They show how grand narratives perform (we shall examine that term) on a U.S. national level, but also how they impinge on cultures that are very distant from it. This class does not propose to merely debunk the historical falsity of the Western myths, but rather to show how these myths managed to supersede history and indeed rewrite it. The class will focus on the development of American popular culture, especially cinema, in the twentieth century to evaluate its impact on the American and global imaginary. Cinema is an art, but it is also an industry, so it is the rise of the American corporate system together with the rise of the middle class that this course will also examine. Thus, the class will pose the question of the dissemination of American culture through aesthetic, political and economic channels.

Learning Outcomes
• Students will develop their ability to analyze and communicate on diverse complex cultural material: film, fictional and non-fictional texts.
• Students will acquire an understanding of the history of the American West and its significance of U.S. and global culture.
• Students will develop an understanding of the symbolic forms of American Westerns and their global impact.
• Students will consider the role of cinema in the dissemination of modern U.S. culture.
• Students will acquire skills in transdisciplinary (American) studies.

Syllabus
Week 1: East of Eden: The History and the Mythology of the American West
Week 2: How the West Was Invented: A Very Brief History of the West and the Western
Week 3: Cinema and Symbolic Forms: Movement and Frame
Week 4: Stagecoach: Performative Aesthetic Forms
Week 5: The Searchers: Difference and Repetition of Symbolic Forms
Week 6: Cheyenne Autumn: U.S. Poetics and Politics
Week 7: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence: The Performance of the Western
Week 8: Once Upon the Time in the West: Visions and Revisions
Week 9: Lonely Are the Brave: The New Last Frontier of the Western
Week 10: The Misfits: No More West—No More Westerns
Week 11: Brokeback Mountain: The Western, Now and Then
Week 12: Django Unchained: Conclusion—The Enduring Significance of the Western

Evaluation
50% students’ projects: Students will work in small groups on specific aspects of the films and texts that they will select and present in class. Students should be able to explain their choices and answer questions from the class and the instructor. Students will sign up for their class presentations on the calendar posted on Moodle. The students’ project will be the midterm grade for the class.
50% final essay: the final essay (c. 8 pages / 3000 words) can be on one or more of the films discussed during the course and should explore their contemporary significance for hemispheric studies. Essay to be uploaded on Moodle by midnight on Thursday, May 23rd (extended deadline midnight on Sunday, May 26th).

No previous knowledge required.

Please note: all necessary material for the course will be made available in class or on Moodle.

Bibliography/Filmography
John Ford, Stagecoach (1936).
—. The Searchers (1956).
—. Cheyenne Autumn (1964).
—. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962).
Sergio Leone, Once Upon the Time in the West (1968).
David Miller, Lonely Are the Brave (1962).
John Huston, The Misfits (1961).
Kevin Costner, Dances With Wolves (1990).
Jim Jarmush, Dead Man (1995).
Clint Eastwood, Unforgiven (1992).
Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain (2005).
Quentin Tarentino, Django Unchained (2012).

Further reading and viewing
Bazin, Hervé. What’s Cinema? 1958-65. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Movement-Image. 1983. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Hugues, Robert. American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. London: The Harvill Press, 1997.
Mitchell, Lee Clark. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. 1970. Rpt. with a new Introduction, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Nash, Henry. The American West as Symbol and Myth. 1957. Reissued with new Preface, Cambridge, MASS: The Presidents of Harvard University, 1970.
Panowsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. 1929. Trans. Christopher S. Wood. New York: Zone Book, 1991.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”
Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. 1985. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
—. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
—. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. 1973. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 2000.