ENGL 297 - Literature in Context:Genre and Mode

Institution:

University of Richmond

Subject:

Description:

Focuses on the ways in which particular literary genres and modes arise and are adapted to new purposes over time. Taught in two modules with two different professors, this course with a grade of C (2.0) or better is a prerequisite to all 300-level literature courses, and thus is designed for those who think they might want to major or minor in English or take upper-level literature courses. Prerequisite(s): English 103 with a grade of C or better or exemption. General Education Requirement: (FSLT) Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: This course focuses on the way particular genres and modes arise and are adapted to new purposes over time. The course is divided into two modules taught by different professors. Each part concentrates on a single genre or mode in its longer historical contexts. The titles of recent courses include "Shapes of Desire: the Lyric and the Novel" and "The Romance and Film Noir. For Fall 2009 the focus of English 297 is "The Western in Fiction and Film." The American Western has its roots in earlier frontier fiction, which in turn has roots in European romance, Judeo-Christian determinism, and classical mythology, to name a few. How, then, do scholars separate the Western as a genre from the more diverse frontier tradition of which it is a part And where does the Western find its terminus, blending into other literary forms that engage similar themes or issues The fiction module will begin with an overview of the frontier tradition in American writing, starting with the fiction of Cooper and progressing through the 1890s, where the cultural forces giving rise to the Western arguably become most acute. Students will read two seminal Westerns-Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) and Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)-exploring how the genre deals with matters of masculinity, domesticity, race, religion, and violence. The course will then examine two anti-Westerns-Walter van Tillburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) and George Bowering's Caprice (1988)-to determine how Western themes and tropes have been adopted, adapted, or undone by later writers. Full-length works will be supplemented with shorter selections from Twain, Harte, Crane, Remington, and L'Amour, as well as relevant criticism from scholars like John Cawelti and Richard Slotkin. The module will conclude with a discussion of "western writing" and other literary categories into which the Western blends. The film module begins in 1903, the year of the genre's inception with The Great Train Robbery and continues with its development through the silent western and the studio period, revival in the 1940s and 1950s, internationalization of the genre in the 1960s, its decline in the 1970s and yet another revival in the late 20th and early 21st century. We will study different iterations of the genre and consider how changing technology, such as introduction of location shooting, sound, color, television, and digital imaging, transformed it over time. We will examine how the Western was appropriated outside of the United States through examples of Mexican comedia rancheria, Italian spaghetti westerns, Eastern European Indianerfilme, and westerns from Australia and Asia. We will consider the Western as cinema (both genre and institution) and as an ideological discourse variously inflected depending on its particular historical junctions and locations. For example, we will study the different ideological functions of the Western during the Cold War period in the United States and in Europe and the functions of the revisionist and border westerns in the late 20th and early 21s

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.richmond.edu

Phone Number:

(804) 289-8000

Regional Accreditation:

Southern Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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