Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses

The Sun Sets In the West: an Introduction

2024-04-15T22:50:32+01:00

Researching the American West in Spain: Beyond Prejudices and Misconceptions

2024-04-15T22:50:32+01:00

This essay analyzes the history of western American studies in Spain, offering a panoramic view of their genesis, development, and current situation. It is argued that the popularity of the American West in Spanish culture and society in the mid-twentieth century contrasts sharply with its neglect by academia due to a series of prejudices and misconceptions, often related to its almost exclusive association with the so-called formula western. I explore the increasing visibility of western American studies in the last decades of the twentieth century and its consolidation during the present century. In fact, nowadays the literature and culture of the American West receive wide attention in Spain, as illustrated by several activities, groups, individual scholars, and publications that demonstrate the vitality and diversity of this area of research.

A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains: An Excursion to Empowerment and Environmentalism

2024-04-15T22:50:32+01:00

This article proposes a reading of Isabella Bird’s travelogue A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879) through the lens of Environmental Studies by focusing on the material and metaphorical uses of nature, scrutinizing the recurrent trope of the mountain, and paying attention to the interaction between the intrepid traveller and nature. While the adventurer deals with the difficulties of the transatlantic pilgrimage, Bird also goes beyond the traditional hymn to the beauty of the landscape in order to condemn the degradation of nature. Arguably, the most valuable insights that this text has to offer beyond empowering women derive precisely from the author’s concern for nature. Bird not only composes an ode to the mountainous scenery in prose, but also an innovative manifesto, where a number of detrimental consequences of the infamous environmental crises are anticipated well in advance.

Faulkner’s Renewal of the Figure of the Grizzly Bear in the American West: From Ancestor to Political Symbol

2024-04-15T21:33:46+01:00

The role of the grizzly bear in many Native American tribes has had a tremendous cultural, spiritual and ecological significance, which was objected by the colonisers’ anthropocentric conception of wildlife as an instrumental value to humans. Literature has been one of the main sources to find traces of this Native American conception of the grizzly bear as deity as well as the colonists’ perspective of the nonhuman animal as threat to be tamed. In this article, I will analyse some folk tales and William Faulkner’s “The Bear” (1942) in order to demonstrate the existence of this conception of the grizzly bear in the American West, as well as the importance of literature for its perpetuation.

Social and Environmental Justice: Land and Housing in Chicana Literature

2024-04-15T21:42:02+01:00

This article analyzes the novels The House on Mango Street (Cisneros, 1984), So Far from God (Castillo, 1993) and Under the Feet of Jesus (Viramontes, 1995) and the drama Heroes and Saints (Moraga, 1994) from the perspective of social and environmental justice, taking
into account Cherríe Moraga’s concept of Land, in which home plays a primary role. The sense of justice in these works emerges from an oppressed landscape in which the environment, the homes and the bodies of the protagonists reflect the damage done to the environment and to human beings. The analysis of the above-mentioned literary works shows how different Chicana authors advocate the achievement of concepts such as social and environmental justice, while at the same time denouncing the impossibility of Chicanos achieving the desired American Dream.

“Squinting through Gunsmoke”: William Burrough’s Errant, Worlded West

2024-04-15T21:48:49+01:00

William Burroughs had been challenging closed worlds since the 1960s. Haunted by the West, born in St Louis, Missouri and dying in Lawrence, Kansas, it was as if he knew America’s inheritance was seeded on the frontier and his characters were caught up in a conditioned cycle of mythic action. His fiction, with its wild experimentation, hallucinogenic cut-up forms, and extreme states of dislocation strove to interrupt such mythic systems and cycles through what I term in this chapter errantry. Burroughs’ fiction presents alternative, errant worldings – carnivalesque plural worlds that refuse to fit into a presupposed pattern, always wandering astray from prescribed paths.

Regeneration through Violence: Echoes of the Myth of the West in Jim Harrison’s A Good Day to Die

2024-04-15T21:55:49+01:00

This essay analyzes some of the reverberations of the myth of the West present in Jim Harrison’s early novel A Good Day to Die (1973), where the myth is put to the test of compatibility with the real world. Richard Slotkin’s notion of regeneration through violence as well as Jane Tompkins’s observations regarding depictions of masculinity in 20th century popular westerns find affirmation in the novel’s narrative. Despite the contemporaneous concern for increasing technology-aided control of nature, evident in other novels, it is remarkable how A Good Day to Die recreates many of the aspects of the myth of the West. Arguably, the novel simultaneously proposes that the kind of perspective that Donna Haraway terms “situated knowledges” in the end allows the unnamed narrator to maintain a more realistic connection with reality than what the myth offers.

Go West! (Village): Queer Displacement and New York as the Liberatory West in American Lesbian Fiction

2024-04-15T22:03:01+01:00

This article analyzes the idea of the American West as the promise of hope for freedom, as it was repossessed by United States queer literature after the 1950s. Hope is promised as a total contrast from tradition: for queer, specifically lesbian characters, it switches Eastwards, looking for the dreamland not on going west but on going to New York. Queer narratives since the 1950s draw on the displacement of the lesbian characters from their homes, forcing them to relocate, recurrently the West Village in New York. The analysis of storyline repetitions present in representative lesbian fiction throughout the decades will be done on several works. I show that the ideal of the West, core to the construction of the American Dream, was reversed in American lesbian fiction, relocating hope after displacement to the queer populated West Village in New York City.

A Postmodern Twist to the Western Film Tradition in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs by The Coen Brothers

2024-04-15T22:11:32+01:00

Although the Coen brothers had already made films related to the Western genre, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) is a different venture, since they wrote the script of this anthology movie comprising six stories themselves. Besides delving into some of the themes that they have dealt with in their filmography–mortality, ethics, violence, justice, etc.–they also provide the film with a number of postmodern twists that hint at an effort to work through some of the problems posed by the mythology of the American West. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs contains the use of intertextuality across various art forms, a parodic treatment, and the inclusion of unusual perspectives that are all typical of postmodern aesthetics and politics of representation.

“And There Is Hope on the Road”: Nomadland’s American West

2024-04-15T22:40:34+01:00

Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-first Century (2017) and Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020) display a contemporary phenomenon which is growing in America, especially in the most western states: people who “choose” the road and mobility as a way of life, thus becoming nomads. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the topic of the American road within this book and movie, on its real and mythical sides, and on issues of mobility. This will inevitably lead to consider the contemporary American West, here too in its real and mythical features. Bearing in mind the strong connection between the American road and the American West, Nomadland contributes to a reimagination and a rethinking of American mobility.

The Wild, Wild Promised Land of Upper Silesians: Panna Maria and Its Cultural Heritage

2024-04-15T22:50:32+01:00

In the mid-19th century, a small number of families from the Upper Silesia region of Poland emigrated to Texas and established Panna Maria, which many historians have identified as the oldest enduring Polish settlement in the United States. The current study focuses on the cultural identity of these settlers and their descendants. It also discusses various aspects of the lasting cultural impact that the Panna Maria story has had on the two areas involved, Texas and Upper Silesia itself. The approach will draw on the theoretical frameworks of cultural and ethnic studies.

Basques in the West: Euskara Jalgi Hadi Mundura

2024-04-15T22:39:58+01:00

Thousands of individuals have left the Basque Country, Euskal Herria, throughout its history. In the US West they encountered a language barrier, which had an effect on their relationships and ability to settle in the host nation. Conversely, their educated children spoke English fluently, which accelerated their integration into mainstream America. Euskara, the Basque language, disappeared from many households as an outcome of this
assimilation. This essay explores the history of Basque emigration and settlement in the region, the relationship between Euskara and the American West since the 19th century, and highlights some of the ongoing initiatives to advance Euskara and its usage in the region.