English 623-001
Senior Seminar: Literature of the American West
Instr: Callanan, Liam
Office: CRT 515; 229-6991
e-mail: liam@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: TR; 12:30-1:45pm; CRT 468
Course Description
This seminar focuses on literature of the American West, fiction and nonfiction, running roughly from Mark Twain to Joan Didion (we'll actually start a little earlier on the timeline and finish a little later). It's long been argued that the American West is a place of massive mythmaking; how, then, does literature written about, and in the west, construct or deconstruct that myth? Moreover, what happens when mythmaking makes reality instead? In short, we'll examine how these books create, and are created by, the American West. And in the process, we'll consider what all this means to how the west and Americans are perceived worldwide.
