Imagining the American West

The American West isn't really a place in this course, it's a cultural product, and the central question is how novels, paintings, photographs, films, and tourist sites have manufactured, sold, and contested that image from frontier myths through sci-fi reinventions. You'll watch a steady rotation of Westerns (Shane through The Harder They Fall and Book of Eli) alongside literary and visual texts, then do the work in four essays, a project, and a performance, learning to read the genre's coding of race, gender, class, and national identity. As an upper-level AMER elective, it assumes you're comfortable with cultural analysis and pushes you toward the kind of close reading and historical-mythic untangling that serious American Studies work demands.