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2019
So much has been written about the classical phase of the Western. Genre fans and for the most part, critics alike have accepted with open arms the idea of a temporally delimited phase in the genre's evolution wherein its "classical" roots had then been established and set. Questions of the actual validity of this common-held notion are often few and far between and its convenience as a critical descriptor and ideological counterbalance appears to justify its existence. The issue is not the lack of clear signifiers appearing in earlier Westerns across an expanse of films that can readily be understood as of a type of classicism, rather it is the idea of a linear evolution that the genre followed from its earliest origins in literature and the screen to the contemporary era. Even more problematic perhaps is the conception of a circumscribed classical phase birthed in the literature of James Fenimore Cooper and Owen Wister, then carried over to the cinema into the early silent Westerns of John Ford and others before meeting its demise when the genre became increasingly self-conscious and non-traditional in the post-World War II era. Tag Gallagher's aim at demystifying this conception appeared in his "Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral: Problems in the 'Evolution' of the Western" where he deconstructs the problematic view of a chronological and equally orderly evolution of the Western. Gallagher points out the flawed theory of generic evolution posed by highly-influential scholars and critics such as Andre Bazin,
1960s Italian Westerns are commonly viewed as postmodern undertakings, emptying the genre of ideological undertones and leaving stylised violence in their place. Indeed, the “Spaghetti” Western arose from processes of transatlantic borrowing in post-war Italy which, while emulating American models of modernity, appropriated and re-formulated symbols of US popular culture. From this hybrid genre in turn emerged a sub-category endorsing armed insurrection against Occidental capitalism; nowhere, it would seem, could the appellation ‘Western’ be more incongruously employed. This article, however, asserts that this militant sub-genre merely adapted the preoccupations of the Hollywood paradigm, identifying therein appropriate means for disseminating such ideologies. Violence was an issue inherent both to the Western and to contemporary Italy, when radical protests and terrorism preoccupied the nation. If the Italian Western indeed drained the genre’s brutality of all meaning, this is not a charge that can be levelled at Damiano Damiani and Sergio Corbucci; such films as ¿Quien sabe? and Compañeros instead constitute populist manifestations of contemporary militant debates concerning armed insurrection. That such transposition was effected with little thematic subversion displays the ideological malleability of what Robert Warshow called the Western’s “serious orientation to the problem of violence”.
Critical Studies in Television
A Post-Apocalyptic Return to the Frontier: The Walking Dead as Post-Western2018 •
2014 •
Despite the many announcements of its death, the western has recently reappeared in American cinema and literature, reinvigorating a tradition that spans from James Fenimore Cooper’s Hawkeye to the Lone Ranger and John Wayne. Among the many recent productions, this volume considers American films, literature, and music, produced between 1985 and 2011: movies such as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Roberto Ford, The Ballad of Little Jo, Brokeback Mountain, 3:10 to Yuma, Don’t Come Knocking, the TV series Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman, the novels Blood Meridian, God’s Country, and hick-hop music. Matching western, men’s, literary, and film studies, Bordin reads the western as a gendered cultural product, which comments on pivotal contemporary themes such as issues of fatherhood, homosexuality, gaze, and race and gender appropriations. Building upon Judith Butler’s notion of the performative nature of gender, Bordin analyzes how the western interacts with models of American masculinity, confirming the genre’s crucial role in the American cultural and ideological landscape at the turn of the new millennium.
The Western in the Global South
The Disinterred Western: Thwarting Fables at the Border in Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and No Country for Old Men2015 •
This chapter analyzes Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005) and No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007) as self-consciously engaging with the Western genre as a historically burdened cultural form. A variant of Philip French and Neil Campbell’s Post-Western, the Disinterred Western aesthetically and narratively thwarts the Classical Western fable. This fable is symptomatic of an ideological consensus and historical subjectivity born of 1950s American popular culture, when the Western was at its height. Reductively simplified in retrospect, the Disinterred Western raises the specter of the Classical Western through deploying its iconographies, tropes, gender-performative scripts, and authoritative point-of-view, only to quash it through immersion in late modernity. The Disinterred Western expands upon Rancière’s notion of the thwarted fable as a clash between mythos and opsis in the image, by raising the sense of aesthetic play to a meta-historical engagement with the genre as a whole. Both on the levels of cinematography and formal style, the Disinterred Western critiques the politics of narration, and how the genre cannot really see the Other. Its old ways of seeing and being in the world are perpetually frustrated within the transnational, militarized border region of contemporary southwest Texas.
Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice
'Demythologizing' Hollywood Western E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times2014 •
This study is an attempt to shed light on the hollywoodization of the myth of the Frontier ― a seminal one in constructing American history and identity ― and E. L. Doctorow's take on it in his Welcome to Hard Times. Considering ideas regarding the importance of cinema in creating a simulated and hypereal world as well as the 1960s counter-culture, the writers try to demonstrate the way one of the major writers of postmodern fiction aspires to challenge, parody and demythologize this central myth and its Hollywood versions. Central to the discussion is how Doctorow foregrounds the very complexity of this 'demythologizing' venture. Keywords: E. L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times, hollywoodization, the myth of the Frontier, postmodern fiction, parody
1997 •
In: Kuhn, Markus/Irina Scheidgen/Nicola Valeska Weber (eds.): Filmwissenschaftliche Genreanalyse. Eine Einführung. Berlin: deGruyter, S. 39-61. http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/185316
Western. Zwischen nationalem Kino und transnationaler Hybridkultur.2013 •
International Westerns: Re-Locating the Frontier, edited by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (Scarecrow Press)
O CANGACEIRO (1953) and the Brazilian Northeastern: The Western "in the Land of the Sun"2014 •
2007 •
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
Film: Genres and Genre Theory2015 •
Centre for Theology and Religious …
Friedman. 2008. Unforgiven: Perspectives on a WesternQuarterly Review of Film and Video 20.4 (Spring 2003): 265-271.
Book Review, Steve Neale's GENRE AND HOLLYWOOD2003 •
Studies in French Cinema
The politics of popular genres in Jean Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange2012 •
Music, Sound, and the Moving Image
Natural Sound in the Early Talkie Western2011 •
Canadian Review of American Studies
How Tonto Became Mr. T: The A-Team and the Transformation of the Western in Post-Vietnam America2014 •
Western American Literature, Volume 54, Number 3, Fall 2019 , pp. 257-294
Foundational Myths and National Identity in European Transnational Post-Westerns2019 •
Memory in / of English-speaking Cinema. Le cinéma comme vecteur de la mémoire dans le cinéma Anglophone, ed. by Zeenat Saleh and Melvyn Stokes, Paris: Michel Houdiard Éditeur, pp, 240-251.
Imagining Jesse James and Ned Kelly: How Historical Outlaws are Remembered as Western Heroes2014 •