Chapter 5
- Read the essays on Critical Regionalism referenced in this chapter and say to what extent you feel they can be applied to studies of American regions like the South and West. The website criticalregionalismdotcom is a source of debate and materials for this whole discussion.
- How has the South or the West been represented by non-American writers and film-makers? What versions, for instance, emerge in such films about the regions as Mississippi Burningor The Night of the Hunter(South) and Once Upon a Time in the Westand Paris, Texas(West)?
- The television series Deadwoodhas been very successful – in what ways can it be seen as a revisionist Western?
- Compare and contrast the two versions of the film True Grit (1969 and 2010)
- Explore the development of a specific genre of popular music in the context of Southern history. E.g. Blues, Jazz, Country Music, Rock and Roll, Soul.
- Explore some of the ways in which Southern identity has been affected by the forces of globalisation at different stages of its history, from its role in the international expansion of slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries, through to contemporary patterns of migration and economic change. Has the interaction of the South with globalisation made it less ‘exceptional’ than has often been claimed?
- Examine the images in this section and discuss what sense of the mythic West they portray. Read Truettner and Barthes to help you in your analysis.
- Recent films, literature and history have become concerned with multicultural contributions and histories of the West. Choose a group and examine its experience and representation in Western history. You might consider Chinese Americans or Hispanic Americans in this study.
- Explore the discussions of the term ‘postwestern’ as it has been used in Western studies and think about how it might be a useful and productive term?
- What dividends might be gained from a study of contemporary Southern black writers, or black writers about the South, particularly in terms of the debate about the continuing significance of history for Southern authors?
- What kinds of versions of the South are represented in rock music in the period since the 1960s?
- Have Southern rock musicians possessed a distinctive self-consciousness that marks them out from other American performers?
- Write a detailed analysis of either Annie Proulx’s story ‘Brokeback Mountain’ or Ang Lee’s film version, demonstrating how it both challenges and confirms certain values and codes of the West.
- Examine how this photograph, Untitled, Denver 1970̶74 , by Robert Adams, shows a different kind of West. What are its characteristics? How is it framed? How does it contrast with our expectations of a Western landscape?
- What versions of the South can be read in the photographs of William Eggleston? Refer to the chapter for ideas and definitions.
The West:
- Photographs of the American West: 1861-1912 - An annotated list of photographs from the National Archives on 14 different topics
- The Bill Lane Center for the American West - Research, teaching, and reporting about the American West, from Stanford University
- New Perspectives on the American West – Extensive resources linked to the 1996 PBS series.
- U.S. West: Photographs, Manuscripts, and Imprints - From Southern Methodist University
- Rocky Mountain Online Archive - From the University of New Mexico
- Northern Plains: Digital Horizons – An extensive collection of images
- Mountain West Digital Library – A central research portal for the region
- Diaries, Memoirs, Letters and Reports Along the Trails West
- Utah History Encyclopedia - The history of Utah in encyclopedia form, consisting of 575 articles and over 200 historic photographs.
- Willa Cather Archive - From the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
- The Third View Project – A photographic survey of the American West
- Critical Regionalism.Com – From the University of Derby
The South:
- Documenting the American South – Texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture
- The Valley of the Shadow - An extensive digital archive of primary sources that document the lives of people in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, during the era of the American Civil War, from the University of Virginia
- First-Person Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920 - Documents the culture of the nineteenth-century American South from the viewpoint of Southerners; created by the University of North Carolina and the Library of Congress
- The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow - From PBS
- Center for the Study of Southern Culture – From the University of Mississippi
- The New Georgia Encyclopedia - Extensive site on all aspects of the state’s history and culture, from the Georgia Humanities Council
- Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture
- Mississippi: Digital Archives – From the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
- South Carolina Digital Library
- America from the Great Depression to World War II, Black and White Photographs from the Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information, 1933-45 – Extensive digitized images of the South ( and West ) in the 1930s, including work by key photographers such as Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein.
- William Eggleston – The official web-site of one of the leading photographers of the contemporary South