Time and Memory in the Western
"Wade: Mind telling me where we're going?
Evans: No, I don't mind telling you. We're going to Contention City. We're going wait in a house by the station and when the 3:10 comes in we're going to put you on it.
Wade: Thanks. Now if we get separated I'll know where to wait for you."
- from 3:10 to Yuma, dir. Delmer Daves
". . . [t]ime-travel narratives that return us to key moments in the history of westward expansion. . . . ‘unravel the temporal ideology of Manifest Destiny’ by unravelling time itself, with time travel figuring the practice of resistant reading by literally reopening the past and retelling the story of the past from the perspective of another present – that of the time traveler."
- from Speculative Wests, by Michael K. Johnson
The literary and cinematic western is a plastic genre, with as many distinct revisions and sub-genres as there are storytellers. There are two key generic unifiers that bring all of these disparate explorations together: a relationship to the landscape of the Western United States (albeit by reference, imitation or inversion); and a sense of the primacy of time. For Ben Wade and Dan Evans, there is a deadline for action: the train to Yuma, and the penitentiary, leaves at 3:10. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (dir. John Ford, 1962), the narrative hinges on out (in)ability to re-enter the past, and the relationship between memory, testimony, and official narrative: between, as the film has it, "fact" and "legend". Furthermore, both of these films were made by film-makers accustomed to using colour film to make westerns, and both were shot in black and white. Searchers (dir. Natar Ungalaaq and Zacharias Kunuk, 2016) is not filmed in black and white but the sparse and snowy Nunavut landscape imbues the film with sepia hues that invoke earlier storytelling to celebrate, critique and explore the legacy of John Ford's The Searchers in a new Native context.
For all of these texts, the relationship to history has a textual primacy even where other aspects of time and/ or memory may be more significant.
Building on the foundations laid by Michael K. Johnson in his recent Speculative Wests, this seminar seeks to explore time, memory and history in the literary and cinematic western from as many perspectives as possible. We would particularly like to invite contributors or contributions that are interested in the following topics:
Evans: No, I don't mind telling you. We're going to Contention City. We're going wait in a house by the station and when the 3:10 comes in we're going to put you on it.
Wade: Thanks. Now if we get separated I'll know where to wait for you."
- from 3:10 to Yuma, dir. Delmer Daves
". . . [t]ime-travel narratives that return us to key moments in the history of westward expansion. . . . ‘unravel the temporal ideology of Manifest Destiny’ by unravelling time itself, with time travel figuring the practice of resistant reading by literally reopening the past and retelling the story of the past from the perspective of another present – that of the time traveler."
- from Speculative Wests, by Michael K. Johnson
The literary and cinematic western is a plastic genre, with as many distinct revisions and sub-genres as there are storytellers. There are two key generic unifiers that bring all of these disparate explorations together: a relationship to the landscape of the Western United States (albeit by reference, imitation or inversion); and a sense of the primacy of time. For Ben Wade and Dan Evans, there is a deadline for action: the train to Yuma, and the penitentiary, leaves at 3:10. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (dir. John Ford, 1962), the narrative hinges on out (in)ability to re-enter the past, and the relationship between memory, testimony, and official narrative: between, as the film has it, "fact" and "legend". Furthermore, both of these films were made by film-makers accustomed to using colour film to make westerns, and both were shot in black and white. Searchers (dir. Natar Ungalaaq and Zacharias Kunuk, 2016) is not filmed in black and white but the sparse and snowy Nunavut landscape imbues the film with sepia hues that invoke earlier storytelling to celebrate, critique and explore the legacy of John Ford's The Searchers in a new Native context.
For all of these texts, the relationship to history has a textual primacy even where other aspects of time and/ or memory may be more significant.
Building on the foundations laid by Michael K. Johnson in his recent Speculative Wests, this seminar seeks to explore time, memory and history in the literary and cinematic western from as many perspectives as possible. We would particularly like to invite contributors or contributions that are interested in the following topics:
- Memory and flashback as narrative tropes
- Time travel and instability
- New contributions to historical research
- BIPOC tellings, re-tellings and revisions of the western
- The women's western
- Representations and recollections of gender variance in the western
- Western nostalgia, and/ or nostalgia in settler colonial narratives
- Contested western histories
- Time constraints in western texts.