Student: Hannah Smay
Graduation date: May 2017
Type: Area of Interest (double major)
Date approved: November 2014
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Summary
“As long as we are attempting to fit our cultures to the landscape, we are still going to need writers to help us… understand and to articulate it for us and to show us the human drama of it” (Meine 1997)
The American West is both a geographic location and a cultural phenomenon. It is at once a vast expanse of land with a huge variety of geology and ecology and the setting for cultural narratives that inform some American ideal of “nature.” There is a tremendous body of literature that treats the American West as a unique landscape that inspires various land ethics. The American West defines some aspect of the American identity because it is the frontier where pioneering, rugged, individualistic Americans can forge and discover. From the early Atlantic settlements, the expanse of American wilderness has been source for imagination and religious exceptionalism (Rivett 2012), but also for pastoral Jeffersonian agrarianism. Although the American West exists at the forefront of my interests, I recognize that this body of literature has inherited the conventions of literary movements encapsulating “nature” and frontier narratives in a broader global scope. I am curious to discover how the literature of this place called the American West creates and responds to its geographic and cultural landscapes. From my background and second major of English, I feel strongly that literature has the power to generate and spread ideas and perpetrate certain ideologies, such as the frontier myth or the Puritan idea that wilderness is a place of sin (Cronon 1995). Mythology and narrative are inextricably linked with value systems within societies and I want to study how this relationship exists within land ethics in the United States.
Many myths are attached to the American West. One of the most prominent myths is the frontier, a place where American exceptionalism and individualism coalesce (Slatta 2010). Because the West is so large and sublime, it holds an ideal of limitlessness. In “Faustian Economics,” Wendell Berry writes, “Our national faith so far has been: “There’s always more.” Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism.” (Berry 2008). This attitude certainly colors our land ethic both individually and nationally. There are many connections between culture and geography, and I wonder how these dynamics are revealed within the stories we tell. Fiction and novels are key places where myths are created and expanded, and by analyzing some of the trademark texts and authors of the West, I hope to understand how these founding myths appear and what effects these narratives have on the way humans interact with the land.
Fiction and literature about the land and the geography of the West has captured some of these attitudes. Art is one of the “means of taming the great western wilderness and conveying the sublimity of place” (Giblett 2009). What is it about the American West that has this literary mystique? How does the unique geology and hydrology inspire awe, greed, or change? For instance, Wallace Stegner attributes the awe of the West to its aridity, describing a unique brilliance of the stars dependent on this atmosphere (Ben-Ari 2000). While geology and earth systems create limits to which stories and histories must conform, there remains the immense power of stories to persuade and create meaning, as William Cronon argues in his treatment “A place for stories: Nature, history, and narrative” (Cronon 1992). Literature is persuasive and has the power to effect social, political, and philosophical institutions. In fact, the seminal writers of the American West, such as Wallace Stegner, Wendell Berry, and Edward Abbey, have had profound, tangible influences on land policy and conservation movements (Dresser 1995). There seems to be a genuine relationship between geography and literary culture in the America West within political, geologic, cultural, and artistic spheres. I want to discover what composes these landscapes that have inspired the literature of the American West and how these texts have transformed the landscape in return.
Works Cited
Ben-Ari, E. T. (2000). Defender of the Voiceless: Wallace Stegner’s Conservation Legacy. BioScience, 50(3), 253.
Berry, W. (2008, May 1). Faustian Economics. Harper’s Magazine, 35-42.
Cronon, W. (1992). A place for stories: Nature, history, and narrative. The Journal of American History, 1347–1376.
Cronon, W. (1995). The Trouble With Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. In Uncommon ground: Toward reinventing nature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Dresser, N. (1995). Cultivating wilderness: The place of land in the fiction of Ed Abbey and Wendell Berry. Growth & Change, 26(3), 350.
Giblett, R. (2009). Wilderness to wasteland in the photography of the American west. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 23(1), 43–52. doi:10.1080/10304310802570866
Meine C. ed 1997. Wallace Stegner and the Continental Vision. Washington (DC): Island Press
Rivett, S. (2012). Religious Exceptionalism and American Literary History: The Puritan Origins of the American Self in 2012. Early American Literature, 47(2), 391–410.
Slatta, R. W. (2010). Making and unmaking myths of the American frontier. European Journal of American Culture, 29(2), 81–92. doi:10.1386/ejac.29.2.81_1
Questions
- Descriptive: What is the “American West”? What geographic and hydraulic features are iconic or unique to the West? What is the literature of the American West? What themes and attitudes are prevalent in this literature? Who are the major authors? What are the major texts? What are the historical, literary, and political trends and movements in America that might have driven western expansion, policy, and art?
- Explanatory: Why do these patterns of common myths and narratives about the American West appear in literature? Do these plots and morals suggest certain attitudes or ethics within Western landscapes? Do the geologic or hydraulic features of the American West spark imagination or mythology about the rivers and landscapes? Have government actions or policies been promoted or demonized by influential Western literature?
- Evaluative: I) Is this frontier myth, which may or not be unique to the United States, an accurate narrative of the American West? II) Does the literature of the West change people’s actions or opinions or correspond with political conservation? To what extent should literature be a watchdog for environmental policy? III) How are the different landscapes in the American West valued differently? What power structures influence the decisions of landscapes to be preserved, developed, mines, dammed, or designated as reservations? What inequities are revealed through narrative morals or land policies?
- Instrumental: I) What literary works and narratives should we teach in public schools? What literary works should be excluded? How do we balance literature as art with literature as a method of moral education in our curriculum? II) How do the ways we access literature (paper, ink, electronically) affect the landscapes of the American West (deforestation, clear cutting, hydroelectric dams, coal)? Are there ethical implications in using materials and resources for publishing and accessing literature? What are the most economically and ethically just means to publish and access literature?
Arts and humanities courses
- HIST 261 (Global Environmental History, 4 credits). Pre-approved A&H course; no justification required.
- PHIL 215 (Philosophy and the Environment, 4 credits). Pre-approved A&H course; no justification required.
- HIST 239 (Constructing the American Landscape, 4 credits). U.S. landscape history as transforming environmental practices over time. Fall 2014.
- ENG 314 (The Romantics, 4 Credits). Survey of the Romantic Period including Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Spring 2015.