Course Syllabus
Except for the required texts listed in the course introudtcion all assignments are availble as e-reserves or via the link provided on the website.
Week 1: Introduction: The American West as Myth
Tuesday, September 1
Course Introduction
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| Asher B. Durand, Progress, or The Advance of Civilzation, 1853, oil on canvas. | Rudy Vanderlands, Driving East on Antelope Valley Freway, 2000, color photograph. |
Thursday, September 3
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| Albert Bierstadt, Yosemite Valley, Glacier Point Trail, c. 1873, oil on canvas, 54 x 84 3/4 in. | Stephen Shore, US 97, South of Klamath Falls, OR, July 21, 1973, color phorograph, 17 1/4 x 21 1/2 in.. |
Roland Barthes, “Myth Today, “ [1957] in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), pp. 109-159.
Richard Slotkin, “Myth and Literature in a New World,” (excerpts) in Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), pp. 3-9, 13-14.
Week 2: Justification and Normalization
Tuesday, September 8
Kurt Wheeler
William H. Truettner, “Ideology and Image: Justifying Westward Expansion,” from The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920 ed. William H. Truettner (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), pp.27-54.
Martha A. Sandweiss, “Views and Reviews: Western Art and Western History,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon, et. al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992), pp. 185-202.
Thursday, September 10
Yoseff Ben-Yehuda & Jamie Roux
Kenneth Haltman, “Introduction: Figures in a Western Landscape,” from Looking Close and Seeing Far: Samuel Seymour, Titian Ramsey Peale and the Art of the Long Expedition, 1818-1823 (University Park: Penn State Press, 2008), pp. 1-27.
Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Science of the Concrete,” (excerpts), in The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 15-33.
Week 3: Manifest Destiny and Westering
Tuesday, September 15
Sarah Balog
Francoise Forster-Hahn, “Inventing the Myth of the American Frontier: Bingham’s Images of Fur Traders and Flatboatmen as Symbols of the Expanding Nation,” in American Icons: Transatlantic Perspectives on Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century American Art, ed. By Thomas W. Ghaehtgens and Heinz Ickstadt (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989), 119-146.
Lee Clark Mitchell, “Falling Short,” in Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 56-93.
Washington Irving, “The Trappers,” excerpts from The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A., in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1850), 1-14.
Thursday, September 17
Paul Clay
Anne Baker, “Word, Image, and National Geography: Panorama Pamphlets and Manifest Destiny,” in American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production 1500-1900, ed. Martin Bruckner and Hsuan Hsu (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 89-108.
Roger Cushing Aikin, “Paintings of Manifest Destiny: Mapping the Nation,” American Art 14 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 78-89. Available online
Angela Miller, "Space as Destiny: The Panorama Vogue in Mid-Nineteenth Century America," in World Art: Themes of Unity in Division, vol. 3, edited by Irving Lavin (University Park: Pennsylavnai Stat euniversity Press, 1986), pp. 739-44.
Week 4: Mapping the West
Tuesday, September 22
Josh Pemberton
J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in Denis Cosgrove et al. The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 277-312.
John Rennie Short, “Mapping the National Territory,” in Representing the Republic: Mapping the United States, 1600-1900 (London: Reaktion, 2001), pp. 174-200.
Andro Linklater, “Introduction,” in Measuring America (New York: Walker & Company, 2002), pp. 1-6.
Northwest Ordinance [1785] Available online
Thursday, September 25
Emily Youatt
Mark Warhus, "An Overview of Indian Maps," in Native American Maps and the History of Our Land (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998), pp. 7-24.
G. Malcolm Lewis, “Indian Maps: Their Place in the History of Plains Cartography,” in Mapping the North American Plains: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Frederick C. Luebke et. al. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), pp. 63-80.
Week 5: West as Garden of Eden
Tuesday, September 29
Luke Fidler
Henry Nash Smith, “The Myth of the Garden and Turner’s Frontier Hypothesis,” in Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), pp. 250-60.
Claire Perry, “Cornucopia of the World,” in Pacific Arcadia: Images of California, 1600-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 199), pp. 61-97.
Nancy Anderson, “The Kiss on Enterprise: The Western Landscape as Symbol and Resource,’ in eds. Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy, Reading American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 208-231.
Thursday, October 1 – No class
Week 6: Surveying the West
Tuesday, October 6
Arty Johnstone
Robin E. Kelsey, “Viewing the Archive: Timothy O’Sullivan’s Photographs for the Wheeler Survey, 1871-74,” Art Bulletin 85 (December 2003), pp. 702-723. Available online
Thursday, October 8
Oliver Mains
Martha Sandweiss, “The Narrative Tradition in Western Photography,” in Photography in Nineteenth Century America, exh. cat. (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 19981), pp. 99-129.
Rebecca Bedell, “Thomas Moran and the Western Surveys,” in The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting, 1825-1875 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 123-146.
Assignment #2 due in class
Week 7: The Aboriginal West
Tuesday, October 13
Salim Moore
Martin Berger , “Landscape Photography and the White Gaze,” in Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 43-79.
Alex Nemerov, “Haunted Supermasculinity: Strength and Death in Carl Rungius's ‘Wary Game’,” American Art 13 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 3-31. Available online
Thursday, October 15
Lara Pena
Brian Dippie, “Green Fields and Red Men,” in George Catlin and His Indian Gallery, exh. cat. (Washington: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2003), pp. 27-62.
See virtual exhibition at http://americanart.si.edu/catlin/highlights.html
William H. Truettner, “Plains Geometry: Surveying the Path from Savagery to Civilization,” Winterthur Portfolio 38 (2003), pp. 199-220. Available online.
“The Indians in American Art,” Crayon 3 (January 1856) reprinted in Sarah Burns and John Davis, American Art to 1900: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 453-454.
Week 8: October 20 and 22 Fall Break
Week 9: The West vs. Modernity
Tuesday, October 27
Jill Jackson
Alex Nemerov, “Frederic Remington: Within and Without the Past,” American Art 5 (Winter - Spring, 1991), pp. 37-59. Available online
Elizabeth Hutchinson, “When the ‘Sioux Chief’s Party Calls’: Kasebier’s Indian Portraits and the Gendering of the Artist’s Studio,” American Art 16 (Summer 2002), pp. 40-65. Available online
Thursday, October 29
Ty Blakeny
Wanda Corn, “The Great American Thing,” in The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1932 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 239-291.
Sally Stein, “On Location: The Placemen (and Replacement) of California in 1930’s Photography,” in Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 170-197.
Week 10: West as Negation
Tuesday, November 3
Sonia Vucetic
Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Haunted by Rhyolite: Learning from the Landscape of Failure,” in The Big Empty: Essays on Western Landscape (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), pp 27-47.
Wayne Fields, “Prairies ad the Literary Aesthetics” and Joni Kinsey, “Prairie Prospects: The Aesthetics of Absence” in Plain Pictures Images of the American Prairie, exh. cat. (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1996), pp. vii-xvi, 11-31.
Wednesday, November 4
Screening, The Searchers (1956), 7 PM, BIO 19
Thursday, November 5
Emily Brown
Edward Buscombe, “The Western, A Short History,” Excepts) and Clive Bush, “Landscape” in The BFI Companion to the Western (New York: Atheneum, 1988), pp. 17-24; 167-170.
Richard Hutson, “Sermons in Stone: Monument Valley in The Searchers,” in The Searchers: Essays and Reflections on John Ford’s Classic Western, ed. Arthur Eckstein and Peter Lehman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), pp. 93-108.
Week 11: The New/Abstract West
Tuesday, November 10
Charlie Renison
John Szarkowski and Robert Adams, “The New West” in Reading into Photography: Selected Essays, 1959-1980 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), pp. 45-50
Lewis Baltz, “Review of The New West,” in Reading into Photography, pp. 57-60.
Anthony Lee, “Photography in the Streets,” in Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 101-146,
Thursday, November 12
Evelyn Genadek
Emily Neff, “Epilogue: The Abstract West,” in The Modern West: American Landscapes 1890-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 237-273.
John Enderfield, “Diebenkorn at Ocean Park,” Arts International 15 (February 1972): 20-25.
Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer 1979), pp. 50-64. Available online
Lecture: Kenneth Haltman "Flight and Predation: The Western Art of Alfred Jacob Miller, Revisited," 5:30 PM, PSYCH 105.
Week 12: Autotopia or The Carceral City
Tuesday, November 17
Ella Gold
Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies [1971], (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 16-55, 93-159, 205-215.
Thomas Pynchon, “A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” New York Times Magazine (12 June 1966), p. 35, 78. Available online.
Elizabeth A. T. Smith, “Domestic Cool: Modern Architecture and its Image in Southern California,” in Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury, exh. cat. (Newport Beach: Orange County Museum pf Art, 2007), pp. 63-79.
Ann M. Wolfe, Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). (skim)
Thursday, November 19
Tess Halavy
Cécile Whiting, “The Erotics of the Built Environment,” in Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 109-137.
Assignment #3 due in class.
Week 13: LA Case Study: Ed Ruscha
Tuesday, November 24
Elizabeth Bidart
Sylvia Wolf, “California Topographies,” in Ed Ruscha Photography, exh. cat (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2004), pp. 128-169.
Ed Ruscha, “LA Suggested by the Art of Ed Ruscha,” in Leave any Information at the Signal (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 220-224
Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies [1971], (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 57-93, 195-204, 217-226.
Thursday, November 26
Thanksgiving Break: No Class
Week 14: Sunshine/Noir
Tuesday, December 1
Caroline Rideout
Sidney Tillim, “The Underground Pre-Raphaelism of Edward Keinholz,” Artforum, (April 1966), pp.38-40.
Maurice Tuchman, “A Decade of Edward Kienholz,” Artforum, (April 66), pp 40-44.
Joan Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook,” in Stumbling Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1968), pp. 217-224.
Mike Davis, “Fortress L.A.,” in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (London: Verso 1990), pp. 223-263.
Wednesday December 2
Screening Chinatown (1973) 7 PM, BIO 19
Thursday, December 3
Becca Roberts
Liahna Babenar, “Chinatown, City of Blight,” in Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays, ed. David Fine, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), pp. 273-85.
Rosalyn Deutsche, "Chinatown, Part Four? What Jake Forgets about Downtown,” Assemblage 20 (April 1993), pp. 32-33. Available online
Garrett Stewart, “The Long Goodbye from Chinatown,” Film Quarterly 28 (1974), pp. 25-32. Available Online
Week 15: California as/is Postmodernism
Tuesday, December 8
Margaret Cardenas
Lawrence Welschler, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 45-210.
Jean Baudrilliard, America (excerpts) [1986], trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1988), pp. 52-61,121-128.
Thursday, December 17
Assignment #4 (Due in my office mailbox at 5 PM)