The discursive importance of the West was a foundational element for early American Studies scholars as they sought to define a distinctive methodology for the new academic discipline. Henry Nash Smith, in the preface to Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), defines his key terms “myth” and “symbol” as words that “designate larger or smaller units of the same kind of thing, namely an intellectual construction that fuses concept and emotion into an image.” He goes on: “The myths and symbols with which I deal have the further characteristic of being collective representations rather than the work of a single mind” (xi). The myth of the frontier is the idea with which he begins his classic study. He argues that St Jean de Crèvecoeur’s question, “what is an American?” can be answered by what Nash Smith calls “the pull of a vacant continent drawing population westward . . .” (3).
The myths and symbols used by successive generations of Americans reveal the impact of the US as “a continental empire” upon what he presents as “the American mind” (4). In Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964) the Virgin Land myth gives way to the pastoral motif of the West as a Garden, where progress is represented by technology in general, and the locomotive in particular, and the pastoral ideal promises opportunities for self-invention and a new life. The tensions that arise when the pastoral ideal conflicts with the destructive force of industrialization are explored by Marx through the conflict between nineteenth-century progressive and pastoral ideals. In this conflict Marx finds "the American view of life" (3), a distinctive "way of ordering meaning and value" (4), which is his subject. Marx is indebted to Henry Nash Smith for his methodological focus on national consciousness through the analysis of myths and symbols. Marx's definition of a "cultural symbol" as "an image that conveys a special meaning (thought and feeling) to a large number of those who share the culture" (4) clearly draws on Nash Smith's earlier work. Marx's work also follows R. W. B. Lewis's The American Adam: Innocence, Tradition, and Tragedy in the Nineteenth Century (1955), which traces a distinctive American style of writing to the experience of the "newness" of the nation, represented by the wilderness of the frontier. For Lewis, the consciousness of the nineteenth-century American is akin to that of a "new Adam" perpetually struggling to separate from the corrupt world of the historical past. Among canonical writers like Emerson, Hawthorne, Henry James, Melville, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, as well as lesser-known writers such as George Bancroft, Horace Bushnell, Orestes Brownson, and Theodore Parker, Lewis finds a common engagement with the prospect of an American future that is unburdened by the past.
Richard Slotkin's trilogy dealing with the history of US national mythology begins with Regeneration Through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973), where he argues that US culture is characterized by attitudes, values, rituals, and traditions that can be traced back to the historical experiences of the settlers who violently displaced native communities as they established their frontier towns. Historical experience becomes symbolic myth which legitimates and perpetuates particular values and behaviors. In Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992), Slotkin shows how vigilante violence is rationalized through western myths, such as those of the "winning fo the West," the outlaw gunfighter, and the lawless Wild West. The racialized nature of vigilante violence is made clear in Ken Gonzales-Day's study Lynching in the West, 1850-1935 (2006), where he shows the frequency with which Latinos but also Native Americans and Asians were lynched in California. This personalized vigilante violence, the right to take the law into one's own hands to seek private justice, Slotkin links with the issue of race to explore, not so much "the American mind" which interested Henry Nash Smith, but the particular power of US national mythology to perpetuate destructive domestic and foreign policies. He explores the western myth in relation to the Philippine-American War, the Cold War, and the My Lai massacre. In the second volume of his trilogy, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (1992), Slotkin argues that the myth of westward expansion, together with the powerful discourse of Anglo-Saxon racial purity, was a key factor in the promotion of America's imperial image through the late nineteenth century. Like earlier Americanists, Nash Smith, Lewis, and Marx, Slotkin ranges widely in his discussions of both "high" and popular culture. But where earlier scholars sought to analyze a national consciousness or "American mind" Slotkin states clearly that his interest is in the operations of cultural ideology. He offers then not an explanation of "Americanness" but a political critique and revisionist historiography of the US. Annette Kolodny's work brings a feminist critique to these issues of ideology and mythological legacy. In The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975) she examines the troping in exploration narratives of the land as female, the explorer as male, and conquest as rape; in The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (1984) she looks to women's appropriation of frontier experience in a feminine tradition of western writing.
Slotkin's monumental work on the legacy of the western "savagery versus civilization" mythology, and the ideological freight borne by this trope, has been very influential on later directions of scholarship on the West in general and popular westerns in particular. Kim Newman (1990) observes that "[w]hile couched in terms of the coming of civilisation, the rise of law and order or the establishment of community values, the Western is essentially about conquest. Cavalries conquer the Indians, pioneers conquer the wilderness, lawmen conquer outlaws and individuals conquer their circumstances. But with each conquest, another stretch of territory, whether geographical or philosophical, comes under the hegemony of the United States of America" (1). As Shohat and Stam in their work on Eurocentrism argue, the ideological premise of the western genre is based on making indigenous people appear to be invaders in their own land, as enemies of western progress, presented with “elegaic nostalgia” and “thanatological tenderness” (118) towards this now-vanished race. In contrast to the elimination of these enemies of national progress and Manifest Destiny, a happy ending is reserved for those European characters who, in the course of the narrative, come to embody the West and its values of progress and improvement. Later westerns critiqued the expansionist narrative privileged in earlier westerns by John Ford and others; perhaps the most sensational of these later revisionary films is Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005), based on E. Annie Proulx's 1997 story. The popular western is, like much American cultural production, ambivalent. John Carlos Rowe opens his study of Literary Culture and US Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (2000) with the observation that if Americans are variously shaped by “a powerful imperial desire and a profound anti-colonial temper” (3) then so too are the literary and cultural texts produced by this ambivalence within the discursive matrix of national identifications.
The West continues to play an important national exceptionalist role, especially in terms of the national imagery through which the US represents itself to itself. Richard Drinnon, in Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (1980), traces the genealogy of what he calls John Adams's “messianic nationalism” (76) back to the Puritan massacre of the Pequots and forward to the western conquest or “Indian Wars” and later to US colonial conflicts in the Pacific such as the Philippine-American War. He writes: “With ... a gentle stir the pigments of Indian-hating shaded off into coolie-hating, the Chinese exclusion act (1882) and the 'Yellow Peril' hysteria at the turn of the century”(221). In each case, Drinnon emphasizes, the threat posed by the enemy takes on apocalyptic dimensions. The idea that the US learned colonizing strategies early, and repeatedly used them on both internal or domestic and external or extraterritorial communities that were marked for elimination, is developed by John Carlos Rowe in Literary Culture and US Imperialism within the complex situation of a new republic that was populated by a racially and ethnically diverse population making various claims to national rights and liberties. Rowe observes: “Virtually from the moment the original colonies defined themselves as a nation, there was an imperial project to restrict the meaning of the American by demonizing foreigners, in part by identifying them with the 'savagery' ascribed to Native and African Americans” (7). US nationalism and American colonialism are therefore linked not only in the literal historical sense that the New World colonies preceded the US nation but in a more profound sense that Richard Slotkin explores in his trilogy: that later cultural images, identities, and behaviors were established during the first 260 years of European settlement (1600-1860).
Internal colonialism and imperialist foreign policy were confused from the earliest nationalist period, not least because of the continental territorial ambitions of the new nation which were promoted and legitimized by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Rowe explicitly likens the elimination of indigenous peoples to the Holocaust: “M
สำคัญ discursive ตะวันตกถูกองค์ประกอบ foundational สำหรับนักวิชาการศึกษาที่สหรัฐอเมริกาก่อนพวกเขาพยายามที่จะกำหนดวิธีที่โดดเด่นในวิชาใหม่ เฮนรี่แนชสมิธ ใน preface เพื่อแผ่นดินบริสุทธิ์: ตะวันตกอเมริกันเป็นสัญลักษณ์และตำนาน (1950), กำหนดเงื่อนไขสำคัญ "ตำนาน" และ "สัญลักษณ์" ของเขาเป็นคำที่ "กำหนดหน่วยใหญ่ หรือเล็กของสิ่ง คือก่อการทางปัญญาที่ fuses แนวความคิดและอารมณ์เป็นภาพชนิดเดียวกัน" เขาไปบน: "ตำนานและสัญลักษณ์ซึ่งผมจัดการมีลักษณะต่อไปของการนำเสนอรวมมากกว่าการทำงานของจิตใจเดียว" (ซี) ตำนานของชายแดนเป็นความคิดที่เริ่มศึกษาคลาสสิค เขาจนคำถามของ Crèvecoeur de ที่ Jean เซนต์ สามารถตอบ "คืออะไรเป็นคนอเมริกัน โดยแนช Smith เรียก" ดึงของทวีปว่างวาดประชากร westward ... ได้ " (3)The myths and symbols used by successive generations of Americans reveal the impact of the US as “a continental empire” upon what he presents as “the American mind” (4). In Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964) the Virgin Land myth gives way to the pastoral motif of the West as a Garden, where progress is represented by technology in general, and the locomotive in particular, and the pastoral ideal promises opportunities for self-invention and a new life. The tensions that arise when the pastoral ideal conflicts with the destructive force of industrialization are explored by Marx through the conflict between nineteenth-century progressive and pastoral ideals. In this conflict Marx finds "the American view of life" (3), a distinctive "way of ordering meaning and value" (4), which is his subject. Marx is indebted to Henry Nash Smith for his methodological focus on national consciousness through the analysis of myths and symbols. Marx's definition of a "cultural symbol" as "an image that conveys a special meaning (thought and feeling) to a large number of those who share the culture" (4) clearly draws on Nash Smith's earlier work. Marx's work also follows R. W. B. Lewis's The American Adam: Innocence, Tradition, and Tragedy in the Nineteenth Century (1955), which traces a distinctive American style of writing to the experience of the "newness" of the nation, represented by the wilderness of the frontier. For Lewis, the consciousness of the nineteenth-century American is akin to that of a "new Adam" perpetually struggling to separate from the corrupt world of the historical past. Among canonical writers like Emerson, Hawthorne, Henry James, Melville, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, as well as lesser-known writers such as George Bancroft, Horace Bushnell, Orestes Brownson, and Theodore Parker, Lewis finds a common engagement with the prospect of an American future that is unburdened by the past. Richard Slotkin's trilogy dealing with the history of US national mythology begins with Regeneration Through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973), where he argues that US culture is characterized by attitudes, values, rituals, and traditions that can be traced back to the historical experiences of the settlers who violently displaced native communities as they established their frontier towns. Historical experience becomes symbolic myth which legitimates and perpetuates particular values and behaviors. In Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992), Slotkin shows how vigilante violence is rationalized through western myths, such as those of the "winning fo the West," the outlaw gunfighter, and the lawless Wild West. The racialized nature of vigilante violence is made clear in Ken Gonzales-Day's study Lynching in the West, 1850-1935 (2006), where he shows the frequency with which Latinos but also Native Americans and Asians were lynched in California. This personalized vigilante violence, the right to take the law into one's own hands to seek private justice, Slotkin links with the issue of race to explore, not so much "the American mind" which interested Henry Nash Smith, but the particular power of US national mythology to perpetuate destructive domestic and foreign policies. He explores the western myth in relation to the Philippine-American War, the Cold War, and the My Lai massacre. In the second volume of his trilogy, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (1992), Slotkin argues that the myth of westward expansion, together with the powerful discourse of Anglo-Saxon racial purity, was a key factor in the promotion of America's imperial image through the late nineteenth century. Like earlier Americanists, Nash Smith, Lewis, and Marx, Slotkin ranges widely in his discussions of both "high" and popular culture. But where earlier scholars sought to analyze a national consciousness or "American mind" Slotkin states clearly that his interest is in the operations of cultural ideology. He offers then not an explanation of "Americanness" but a political critique and revisionist historiography of the US. Annette Kolodny's work brings a feminist critique to these issues of ideology and mythological legacy. In The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975) she examines the troping in exploration narratives of the land as female, the explorer as male, and conquest as rape; in The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (1984) she looks to women's appropriation of frontier experience in a feminine tradition of western writing. Slotkin's monumental work on the legacy of the western "savagery versus civilization" mythology, and the ideological freight borne by this trope, has been very influential on later directions of scholarship on the West in general and popular westerns in particular. Kim Newman (1990) observes that "[w]hile couched in terms of the coming of civilisation, the rise of law and order or the establishment of community values, the Western is essentially about conquest. Cavalries conquer the Indians, pioneers conquer the wilderness, lawmen conquer outlaws and individuals conquer their circumstances. But with each conquest, another stretch of territory, whether geographical or philosophical, comes under the hegemony of the United States of America" (1). As Shohat and Stam in their work on Eurocentrism argue, the ideological premise of the western genre is based on making indigenous people appear to be invaders in their own land, as enemies of western progress, presented with “elegaic nostalgia” and “thanatological tenderness” (118) towards this now-vanished race. In contrast to the elimination of these enemies of national progress and Manifest Destiny, a happy ending is reserved for those European characters who, in the course of the narrative, come to embody the West and its values of progress and improvement. Later westerns critiqued the expansionist narrative privileged in earlier westerns by John Ford and others; perhaps the most sensational of these later revisionary films is Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005), based on E. Annie Proulx's 1997 story. The popular western is, like much American cultural production, ambivalent. John Carlos Rowe opens his study of Literary Culture and US Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (2000) with the observation that if Americans are variously shaped by “a powerful imperial desire and a profound anti-colonial temper” (3) then so too are the literary and cultural texts produced by this ambivalence within the discursive matrix of national identifications. The West continues to play an important national exceptionalist role, especially in terms of the national imagery through which the US represents itself to itself. Richard Drinnon, in Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (1980), traces the genealogy of what he calls John Adams's “messianic nationalism” (76) back to the Puritan massacre of the Pequots and forward to the western conquest or “Indian Wars” and later to US colonial conflicts in the Pacific such as the Philippine-American War. He writes: “With ... a gentle stir the pigments of Indian-hating shaded off into coolie-hating, the Chinese exclusion act (1882) and the 'Yellow Peril' hysteria at the turn of the century”(221). In each case, Drinnon emphasizes, the threat posed by the enemy takes on apocalyptic dimensions. The idea that the US learned colonizing strategies early, and repeatedly used them on both internal or domestic and external or extraterritorial communities that were marked for elimination, is developed by John Carlos Rowe in Literary Culture and US Imperialism within the complex situation of a new republic that was populated by a racially and ethnically diverse population making various claims to national rights and liberties. Rowe observes: “Virtually from the moment the original colonies defined themselves as a nation, there was an imperial project to restrict the meaning of the American by demonizing foreigners, in part by identifying them with the 'savagery' ascribed to Native and African Americans” (7). US nationalism and American colonialism are therefore linked not only in the literal historical sense that the New World colonies preceded the US nation but in a more profound sense that Richard Slotkin explores in his trilogy: that later cultural images, identities, and behaviors were established during the first 260 years of European settlement (1600-1860). นโยบายต่างประเทศจักรวรรดินิยมและลัทธิอาณานิคมภายในถูกสับสนจากแรกสุดของรอบระยะเวลา ไม่น้อย เพราะความทะเยอทะยานดินแดนแผ่นดินใหญ่ของประเทศใหม่ซึ่งได้รับการส่งเสริม และ legitimized ตามหลักคำสอนของลิขิต Rowe likens ตัดของชนพื้นเมืองอย่างชัดเจนเพื่อฮอโลคอสต์: "M
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