ORCID Identifier(s)

0000-0001-8193-8452

Graduation Semester and Year

2016

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in English

Department

English

First Advisor

Stacy Alaimo

Abstract

This project traces the history of the American West and its inhabitants through its literary, cinematic and cultural landscape, exploring the importance of public and private narratives of resistance, in their many iterations, to the perceived singular trajectory of white masculine progress in the American west. The project takes up the calls by feminist and minority scholars to broaden the literary history of the American West and to unsettle the narrative of conquest that has been taken up to enact a particular kind of imaginary perversely sustained across time and place. That the western heroic vision resonates today is perhaps no significant revelation; however, what is surprising is that their forward echoes pulsate in myriad directions, cascading over the stories of alternative voices, that seem always on the verge of slipping away from our collective memories, of being conquered again and again, of vanishing. But a considerable amount of recovery work in the past few decades has been aimed at revising the ritualized absences in the North American West to show that women, Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans and other others were never absent from this particular (his)story. Their presence has been revealed in the recovered works of fiction, life writing, and the historical record. There is compelling evidence that narratives proffered by women and minority writers during the nineteenth century resist the grand narratives authorized by the tenants of Manifest Destiny—a paradigm that continues to infiltrate the literature, scholarship and political landscape of the American West. But recovery efforts and explorations of contemporary westerns written by women and minorities remain incomplete and under theorized. Our perceptions of the American West and its past continue to be fueled by a limited number of highly popularized fantasies that provide the foundation for many cultural beliefs and attitudes. Only in continuing to examine the alternative narratives and attending to even small acts of resistance can we disrupt traditional models of thinking about and responding to the place of the American West.

Keywords

American West, Pioneer, Frontier, Captivity, Great plains, Diaries, Native American, Percival Everett, Willa Cather, James Welch, Winona LaDuke, Zitkala Sa

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

Download

Share

COinS