Course Description: Despite the American West’s reputation as a place where “men can be men,” people of all genders have participated in creating the West’s myths as well as its realities. Through examining diverse stories of the West, this course will explore its status as an idea as much as a region as well as consider how it functioned as a site of conquest and a borderland or “contact zone” where gender, racial, ethnic, and sexual identities were destabilized and negotiated. Focusing on writers who identified as women or who inhabited or intersected with that category, we will also analyze how people used literature to represent their relationship to the landscape, and we will consider the perspectives of newcomers as well as of those who call the region not “the West” but simply “home.

Student’s Description: In this class, we read several passages and watched a couple educational movies that correlated with the course. Classes were based on discussions and bouncing off of each other’s interpretations of what topics we were focusing on. We also were assigned multiple writing assignments to prove our close reading.