Document Type
Syllabus
Publication Date
Fall 9-1-2024
Course Description
For over a century, the American West has had a special place in the history of film, as frontier robbers and sheriffs, cowboys and Indians, horsemen and wagon trains filled silver screens. Quickly, a full-fledged genre emerged, with its own forms, expectations, and ideological commitments. Yet, almost as soon as the conventions of the Western were established, they were called into question. Whether in the revisionist “anti-Westerns” that subverted classical traditions; in the Western’s international travel to Italy, Russia, and Japan; or in the recent domestically-minded strain of Neo- Westerns, the genre has been seen as a potent site to negotiate the complex meanings of Manifest Destiny, uncompromising individualism, racial displacement, and American cultural hegemony. In this course, we will consider Western films as historical documents that reflect profound developments in cultural ideologies around the globe and in specifically American mythmaking. Considering topics including race, gender, class, violence, community, and enterprise, we will discover how struggles over the fate of the genre are also struggles over shared values. We will see what we can learn about ourselves, our cultures, and our world from these movies.
Recommended Citation
Sjol, Jordan, "FLME 197A FYS: The Western Film History, Mythology, and Ideology Sjol Fall 2024" (2024). All Course Syllabi. 695, Scholarly and Creative Work from DePauw University.
https://scholarship.depauw.edu/records_syllabi/695
Student Outcomes
By the end of this course, students will be able to… 1. RECALL important features of the development of Western films as well as several theoretical approaches that seek to unpack them, 2. UNDERSTAND the ways in which film and other media help to structure collective unconscious understandings of important social concepts, including race, gender, and national belonging, 3. ANALYZE the embedded ideological content carried by audiovisual media, and 4. CREATE original, nuanced, and research-supported argumentative writing that presents a clear thesis to a specified audience