Alex Trimble Young
October 5, 2014
alexanty@usc.edu
Sample Syllabus: Senior Seminar in English
Frontiers of The Literary Imagination: Settler colonialism and Dissent in Post-1945
American Literature
Robert Adams, “Pikes Peak,” Colorado Springs, CO, 1969
Frontier narratives play a strangely bifurcated role in contemporary U.S. culture. On the one
hand, the myth of Westward expansion is central to the self-representation of the U.S. state: US
presidents from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama have evoked “pioneers who pushed westward
against an unforgiving wilderness” (Obama) to allegorize the struggles of the nation. On the
other, individuals and communities who havesought to rebel against the ideological consensus of
nation often appropriate the myth of the frontier for their own purposes. Whether countercultural
dropouts like Jack Kerouac, anti-racism activists like Ishmael Reed, or radical libertarians like
Joan Didion, a diverse array of dissenting voices have looked to the Western past to allegorize the
political struggles of the present.
In this course, we will explore how such acts of “figurative frontiering” shape both literary form
and the political content of the work of a diverse array of authors in the post-1945 period. Along
the way, we’ll consider how the frontier has served as the figurative ground upon which many
literary critics, historians, and American studies scholars have contested “the meaning of
America,” and delve into scholarship on the frontier from other settler societies such as Australia
and New Zealand in order to consider the frontier in its transnational contexts. Finally, we’ll
venture toward “the other side of the frontier” to consider how the literature of the Indigenous
peoples of North America poses a unique challenge to the frontier rhetoric that shapes the
discourse of American consensus and of American dissent.
Book List:
Oscar Zeta Acosta, Autobiography of A Brown Buffalo
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Joan Didion, Where I Was From
Louise Erdrich, The Round House
Jack Kerouac, On The Road
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
Ishmael Reed, Yellow-Back Radio Broke Down
Jack Spicer, Collected Poems
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Week 1 &2: Frontier Narrative and The Liberal Consensus
Required Reading: Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright;” Richard Slotkin, “Conquering New
Frontiers: John Kennedy, John Wayne, and The Myth of Heroic Leadership, 1960-1968;” Sacvan
Bercovitch, “Rites of Assent: Rhetoric, Ritual, and The Rites of American Consensus.”
Alex Trimble Young
October 5, 2014
alexanty@usc.edu
Week 3: Jack Kerouac’s Fellaheen Frontier
Required Reading: Jack Kerouac, On The Road; Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of
The Frontier in American History.”
Week 4: Race and The Countercultural Frontier
Required Reading: Norman Mailer, “The White Negro;” James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks
at the White Boy;” Manuel Luis Martinez, “‘With Imperious Eye’: Kerouac’s Fellaheen
Western.”
Week 5&6: Settler Colonial Studies and the Transnational Frontier
Required Reading: Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race;”
Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Introduction (excerpt); Margaret Jacobs,
“Comparative Settler Colonialism and the History of the American West;” Film: Nick Cave, The
Proposition
Week 7: Spicer’s Queer Frontier
Required Reading: Jack Spicer, “Psychoanalysis: an Elegy;” Billy The Kid, and The Book of
Magazine Verse; Leslie Fiedler, The Return of The Vanishing American (excerpt); Joseph Boone,
“Introduction: Queer Frontiers.”
Week 8: A Decolonial Western? Ishmael Reed and The Countercultural Frontier
Required Reading: Ishmael Reed, “The Feral Pioneers,” Yellow-back Radio Broke Down, “God
Made Alaska for The Indians.”
Week 9: Joad Didion’s Frontier Pragmatism
Required Reading: Joan Didion, “On Morality,” “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” Where I Was
From.
Week 10: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Queer Borderlands
Required Reading: Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza; Kerwin Klein,
Frontiers of The Historical Imagination (excerpt).
Week 11: Hunter S Thompson’s Reverse Western
Required Reading: Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, “The Battle for
Aspen.”
Week 12: Oscar Zeta Acosta, Mestizaje and The Countercultural Cowboy
Required Reading: Oscar Zeta Acosta, Autobiography of A Brown Buffalo; Ben Olguin,
“Caballeros and Indians: Mexican American Whiteness, Hegemonic Mestizaje, and Ambivalent
Indigeneity in Proto-Chicana/o Autobiographical Discourse, 1858–2008”
Week 13: Looking East: N. Scott Momaday and The New Frontier
Required Reading: N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, “The Morality of Indian Hating”
Week 14: Louise Erdrich and Indigenous Alternatives to the Logic of Elimination
Required Reading: Louise Erdrich, The Round House; Jodi Byrd, “Follow The Typical Signs:
Settler Sovereignty and Its Discontents.”