ENG 655: Literаture оf the Americаn WestMidterm Exаm Part I. Identificatiоn. Chоose five of the following quotes. For each quote, write a cohesive paragraph that identifies the author, title, and significance. Each item is worth five points. (25 points)1.”The Name of Deadwood Dick was given to me by the people of Deadwood’s South Dakota July 4, 1876, after I had proven myself worthy to carry it, and after I had defeated all comers in riding, roping, and shooting, and I have always carried the name with honor since that time.”2. “He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it.”3. “The Central Pacific hired him on sight; chinamen had a natural talent for explosions.”4. “Good, he said. That’s good. Then he shot her.”5. “Poor Rollo was helping Tick move the emus to another building when one of them turned on a dime and come right for him with its big razor claws.”6. “Buffalo Bill opens a pawn shop on the reservation/right across the border from the liquor store/and he stays open 24 hours a day. 7 days a week”7. “And I don’t just mean Iowa farmers. There’s fellas can’t keep away from us. There’s girls fell in love with tractors all over this country. There is girls married tractors.”8. “Starvation makes fools of anyone. In the past, some had sold their allotment land for one hundred pound weight of flour.”9. A snake of his size, in fighting trim, would be more than any boy could handle. So in reality it was a mock adventure; the game was fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for many a dragon-slayer.”10. “The irritating thing was she beat with pairs and never bluffed, because she couldn’t, and still she ended each night with exactly one dollar.”11. “The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack’s sleeves.” Part II. Essay. Choose ONE question. Write a thoughtful and persuasively argued essay that includes specific detail and supporting evidence from course readings. Aim for at least six paragraphs. (65 points) 1. N. Scott Momaday’s essay “The American West and the Burden of Belief” records his meditations on the American West as a vision of the settler’s imagination. Settlers envisioned wide-open spaces ready for farms, ranches, and businesses. They saw a place to “put themselves on the map.” Such a vision aligns with Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, in which he argued that the conquest of a wilderness created a uniquely American identity. That is, his ideas rely on frontier myth to establish a narrative about westward expansion as the progress of national identity. To Momaday’s point, this vision obscured the fact that the West was already “occupied.” It was a sacred homeland to the indigenous peoples who lived there.Momaday’s essay asks his readers to think about the inventions of the imagination— our ideas of the West—that made it possible to romantically view a landscape of “wide-open spaces” while also engaging in the violent tactics of conquest (378). In the invention of the American West, what are the lies we live by? The frontier myths propagated by Turner’s thesis, William Cody’s Wild West Show, and the countless narratives of masculine heroism and conquest that became resurrected time and again thereafter—all these stories only continued the distortion of the West that Momaday discusses. However, as Momaday asserts, when we begin to see the American West as having a sacred dimension, we begin to see that those stories of the West that began with European perspectives worked to the detriment of Native peoples. Consider Louis Erdrich’s Tracks, Sherman Alexie’s “Evolution,” and N. Scott Momaday’s “The American West and the Burden of Belief.” Write an essay about how each literary work provides a counter narrative to the story of westward expansion. How does each engage the harmful effects of frontier mythology with its various distortions while also creating an alternate perspective that engages the sacred dimensions, oral traditions, and lived experiences of Native peoples? In what sense do these novels show us that European perspectives worked to the detriment of Native cultures? At the same time, how do these authors demonstrate the perspective of Native peoples? How does each demonstrate the survival of Native cultures and stories? 2. In John Ford’s The Searchers, the main character, Ethan, fills the role of the rugged individual—the lone frontiersman who takes on the job of restoring civilization in a wild country, even though he does not seek to become a part of the society he “saves.” By focusing on one man’s journey to save a helpless young girl from Comanche Indians, this film identifies the Comanche and the West as “savage,” thereby justifying manifest destiny. Cast against the rough terrain of the West, Ethan’s masculine traits—ruggedness, fearlessness, and individualism—accentuate the desire for men to supply order in a wilderness. Choose three significant characters from three different literary works we have discussed. How does each writer develop a character that counters the masculine hero-ideal made famous by films like The Searchers? Analyze how the writer’s use of characterization can be tied to a specific message about the American West.3. In Owning It All, William Kitteredge suggests that the myth of the West as a boundless frontier can no longer be sustained, and he calls for a new narrative defining the region. He writes: “There is no more running away to territory. That is it, for most of us. We have no choice but to live in community. If we’re lucky we may discover a story that teaches us to abhor our old romance with conquest and possession.” Choose three of the following works: Close Range, My Ántonia, “Evolution,” “The Grandfather of the Sierra Madre,” and Tracks. (If you choose Close Range, then focus on one or two short stories only.) How does each work offer up a story that “teaches” the audience to “abhor our old romance with conquest and possession”?4. Readers of Proulx’s Wyoming Stories and Cather’s My Ántonia are often left with the impression that the landscape becomes an important character, one that silently shapes and influences the protagonists in each writer’s fictional world. Both writers’ representation of the landscape magnifies the importance of understanding the West as an actual geographic and cultural place rather than Frederick Jackson Turner’s abstractly imagined frontier as a process of conquest. In other words, Turner’s frontier thesis assumes that humans can and should conquer the so-called “primitive” and “wild” lands of the West. How do Cather and Proulx depict the landscape as a character, force, or “being” in its own right? Within the fictional worlds of each writer, do characters shape and conquer the land, or does the land shape and conquer them? Or do characters find a more balanced form of cohabitation? What does each writer reveal about human relationships to the environment?5. In The American West: The Invention of a Myth, David Murdoch claims that America affirms its identity through a ritual return to the mythic West. As Murdoch argues, the mythic West is an invention “produced to serve a specific function at a specific time—to resolve the contradiction between a past in which America’s values were rooted and a future where they seemed doomed to disappear” (100). Over the last one hundred years, the West has become an imaginative zone in which political ideas and social conversations become projected and tested. Choose three different writers from the syllabus. How does each writer respond to the frontier mythos of yesterday as well as its newer incarnations, particularly as seen in the ideas of rugged individualism and conquest put forward by Frederick Jackson Turner, William Cody, and Theodore Roosevelt? Using at least three works of fiction, explore the social conversations about the West that surface in each text. How does the idea of the West become imagined and reimagined through the cultural renovation of the cowboy, the depiction of landscape, and/or the representation (or erasure) of diverse cultural histories? What specific function does the writer’s depiction of the West serve?