The Frontier in American Literature

Catalog description

For the last five centuries, the frontier, understood as the place where humanity comes into contact with its apparent absence in the shape of alien beings and landscapes, has been the subject of some of the most lasting and powerful American stories. In this course, students concentrate on some of the major representations of the frontier produced between the 1820s and the present to learn how to recognize and talk about the position that the American western has occupied in our culture. Authors include Cooper, Twain, Cather, and McCarthy; filmmakers include Ford, Peckinpagh, and Eastwood.