S26-40 Is the Old West Still Part of Our Lives?
Class | Registration opens 3/2/2026 9:00 AM EST
Tom Lyon in his book The Literary West describes two Wests: 1) “mostly a mental place, a projection. Wild and open...everything the over-civilized East... is not. It’s a ticket to freedom.” This West is a myth featuring familiar images, a rider on horseback wearing a “wide-brimmed hat,” riding through acres of grass or empty prairie land--alone, self sufficient. Sometimes Indians appear reminding us of what came before. The 2nd West is “ordinary ground, less densely populated [than that of the East] more fragile...more easily abused and taking longer to recover. This West [is] where people live and have effects on the landscape.” Sometimes these effects have tragic outcomes. The literature we will read is composed of both these Wests--the mythic and the actual, discussing stories featuring both, sometimes within the same story--these are known as revisionist Westerns.
Leonard Engel
Leonard Engel, Professor Emeritus of English at Quinnipiac University, served as Chair of the English Dept for 18 years; in 1989, he was selected “Outstanding Faculty of the Year”; in 2013, he received Quinnipiac’s “Excellence in Teaching Award.” He has edited seven collections of essays beginning with The Big Empty: Essays on the Land as Narrative in 1994 and concluding with The Films of Clint Eastwood: Critical Perspectives in 2018. He has written many articles on American literature and film, from Poe and Melville to the present; most recently--“Charles Portis and True Grit,” (Summer 2021), and “Thoreau, Whitman, and Abbey: Down the River and on the Open Road,” (Fall 2021) both published in Journal of the West.