John Wayne, Sitting Bull, Ansel Adams, and Albert Bierstadt; rattlesnakes, cactus, deserts, and volcanoes; the Frontier, Las Vegas, Wounded Knee, and the Nevada Nuclear Test Site; Hoover Dam, railroads, Reservations, and gold mines; painters, photographers, cowboys, environmentalists; all are part of the myths and realities of the American West.

The West has always played a significant role in the American imagination. It has been a primary source of our feelings of pride and exceptionalism. The arid landscape has been viewed as a virgin wilderness, a spiritual testing ground, a place to escape the constraints of civilization, a space where we can connect with our "primitive" other, and a tabula rasa waiting to be inscribed with the meanings we bring to it. Here we have established huge national parks to preserve the pristine wilderness and the recreational possibilities it provides...along with strip mines, clear-cut forests, toxic waste dumps and nuclear test sites. How can we account for the contradictions and ambivalence in our attitudes towards the land west of the Mississippi?

This course will focus on how the American West has been pictured in painting, sculptures, photographs, and literature for the last two hundred years. We will try to trace continuities and discontinuities in American attitudes towards nature, and how these attitudes have affected our conceptions of national identity. Although most of the dominant histories and mythologies have presented the West as a primarily masculine (and Caucasian) space, we will also investigate the transformations wrought (and the meanings inscribed) by women and people of color. We will look at images produced by a wide variety of artists and photographers, including Ansel Adams, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Georgia O'Keeffe, Timothy O'Sullivan, Frederick Remington, and Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie. Readings from the course will be drawn from art history, political tracts, popular literature, environmentalist essays, and media coverage.