Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain (1903)
Isabella Bird, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1878)
William F. Cody, Life of Hon. William F. Cody Known as Buffalo Bill (1879)
James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (1823)
Zane Grey, The Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)
John Wesley Powell, Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons (1874)
Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Letters of a Woman Homesteader (1914)
Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872)
Sarah Winnemucca, Life Among the Paiutes (1883)
Owen Wister, The Virginian (1902)

Strongly Recommended: MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 5^th ed., and Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms

On Reserve at Dunbar Library: These books, while not exhausting the library's resources, are among the more useful items for the study of literature of the American West:

Western Literature Association, A Literary History of the American West. PS 271 L58 1987

WLA, Updating the Literary West. PS 271 U64 1997

Pilkington, ed., Critical Essays on the Western American Novel. PS 374 W4 C7

Wallman, Westerns: Parables of the American Dream. PS 374 W4 W27 1999

Slotkin, Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. E179.5 S6 1985

------Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. PS88 S5

------Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. E169.12 S57 1998

Stegner, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. PS 3537 T316 Z473 1993

Useful periodical: Western American Literature. PS 271 W46 (Dunbar holds a complete set, but some older volumes are in the SW Depository—expect a 36 hour turnaround on requests.)

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Tompkins,West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns.

About the readings: The American West is not so much a geographical space—indeed its boundaries shifted continually during the nineteenth century—as it is a great signifier whose content drifts radically. During the period of U.S. westward expansion—roughly 1820-1920, most Americans' experience of the west was textual: easterners eagerly devouring fiction, memoir and reportage; westerners supplying them, but also using the written word to compete for money, political power, land, fame, survival, ownership, autonomy. Over the century a set of tropes emerged which still dominate discourse about the American West. In this course we will encounter a broad, but by no means exhaustive sample of writings from the period, which we will read with an eye toward their treatment of what have come to be seen as essential western topics.

Reading: We will discuss a new text each week. Some are quite lengthy. Please try to stay on top of them.

4^th-Hour Project: Post and respond weekly to an email discussion group. I consider an adequate post to be one which fills about 2/3 of the screen. This is your chance to shape discussion, work out your own ideas, critique or elucidate the readings, ask for help, or test a theory of your own. Often these email discussions are more lively than class discussion because you can comment at your leisure and when you feel most inspired to post. To keep discussion useful, please treat your posts as part of a conversation, don't just list questions or make pronouncements. Don’\'t worry about being profound or seeming dumb. Listen to what others are saying. Don't shy away from argument, or even hot contention, but don't forget your manners either. Ten postings, spread over the ten-week term, are required for an A for this portion of the work. Nine for a B and Eight for a C, etc.. Fewer than seven, no credit. Add the number 750 to your subject heading, so we’ll know it’s not just plain old email (20%).

• 2 short, provocative responses (300-450 words) ask you to look at the assigned reading in terms of the themes sketched by Stegner, or in connection with a related text (mode, genre, tone, character, incident) read previously in the term or in response to an ongoing related discussion thread in class or online. Ideally these short responses should build on each other. Absolutely, these responses should provoke class discussion. Bring sufficient copies to pass out to the class and be prepared to read your response out loud in class (@10%)
• Seminar paper (3500-4300 words) asks you to critically survey the appearance/ development/use of some western theme as it appears in three or more course texts. We will discuss the possibilities in class around midterm. You should choose texts for which you can argue a plausible connection. You should draw on a minimum 6 secondary sources for this paper. A working bibliography and 250 word topic proposal are due November (60%).