The New American West in Literature and the Arts: A Journey Across Boundaries

Description

The story of the American West is that of a journey. It is the story of a movement, of a geographical and human transition, of the delineation of a route that would soon become a rooted myth. The story of the American West has similarly journeyed across boundaries, in a two-way movement, sometimes feeding the idea of that myth, sometimes challenging it. This collection of essays relates to the notion of the traveling essence of the myth of the American West from different geographical and disciplinary standpoints. The volume originates in Europe, in Spain, where the myth traveled, was received, assimilated, and re-presented. It intends to travel back to the West, in a two-way cross-cultural journey, which will hopefully contribute to the delineation of the New―always self-renewing―American West. It includes the work of authors of both sides of the Atlantic ocean who propose a cross-cultural, transdisciplinary dialogue upon the idea, the geography and the representation of the American West. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Page Contents List of Contributors Acknowledgments Best Ice Cream West of the Mississippi Introduction: (A) Traveling West Trends in Western American Studies, or the Road as Seen from the Borrow Pit PART 1 The West Travels Across Myths 1.1 Other Western Spaces 1 Forging the Future, Forgetting the Human, or What the Los Angeles Freeways Erased: Oblivion in Helena María 2 Diasporic Native Americans in Sherman Alexie’s Short Stories: Roots and Routes in Urban Contexts 3 Nature, Environment, and Direct Action in the American West: Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang 1.2 Other Western Voices 4 Mary Hallock Foote’s Reimagining of the Woman’s West 5 Crossing Time, Crossing Space: Traumatic Memory in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred PART 2 The West Travels Across Boundaries 2.1 Continental Journeys 6 “New Blood Time Now”: The American West in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings 7 Behind the Mask of Zorro: The Americanization of the Legend and Isabel Allende’s Anticolonial Revision 2.2 Intercontinental Journeys 8 Pynchon Stretches West to East in Against the Day 9 No Country for Young Men: Geographies of Anxiety in My Own Private Idaho 10 Exit West to a Borderless Frontier 2.3 Transcontinental Journeys 11 The Western Before the Western: Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) as a Paradigm of Pre-Western Fiction 12 Beyond the Atlantic: The American West in Twenty- First-Century Southwestern European Literature 13 Uncovering the Western: Pastoralism, Conflict, and Revenge in Agnieszka Holland’s Film Spoor PART 3 The West Travels Across Disciplines Visual and Aural Journeys 14 Looking Beyond the West from the Dairy Queen: Local Apertures, Planetary Visions 15 “Comanches in Spain!”: (Re)visiting a Spanish Exhibition on the “Far West” 16 Genre Revision and Hybridity: Westerns and the West in Twenty-First-Century American Television 17 The Basque Far West: Expressions Through Art and Music Index