The rise of the New Western in the 1960s: A Postmodern Perspective
As it is widely known the 1960s, both in America and Europe, are typified with the
“counter-culture revolution” when preconceived, cultural and artistic values were
contested and uprooted to be replaced by more liberal, experimental and revolutionary
paradigms pertaining to almost all aspects of life and society. What is more important, the
1960s are regarded as the era which gave birth to postmodernism, even though the use of
the term and its definition did not become popular until the 1970s. Furthermore, the
1960s, with their general mistrust towards preconceived and media generated images, led
to the rise of a new kind of Western labeled the New Western or Post-Western, which,
even though less popular than the classic western genre, undertook to re-present the
western experience anew making use of the recently emerging fictional paradigms such
as parody, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, to name a few.
In this light, three apparently strikingly Western novels, namely Thomas Berger’s Little
Big Man (1964), Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) and E. L.
Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times (1960), exemplify outstanding examples of the New
Western or Post-Western launched in the 1960s. As such, each in its own way and yet on
similar terms, the above-mentioned works blend both Western and metafictional elements
into a more sustainable fictional and mythical entities thus revealing alternative and more
intriguing Western histories (lower case). Above all, they revitalize the “literature of
exhaustion” and “silence,” as John Barth and Ihab Hassan respectively labeled it in the
1960s, by creating real fiction out of the remnants of the so called out-dated popular
culture, that is, the classic western.
Artur Jaupaj PhD
Head of Public Relations & Communications Department
European University of Tirana
www.uet.edu.al
arturjaupaj@hotmail.com
mobile: + 355 692317403