"Feels Like Times Have Changed": Sixties Western Heroes
The topic of my dissertation is the genre of the western in popular music, film, literature, and television from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. In particular, I focus on the western formula hero as refigured through an era of cultural transition. My project joins an ongoing discussion of how the transformation of popular genres reflects and informs social transformation. Specifically, this dissertation explores the politics of influential artists such as Sam Peckinpah, Bob Dylan, and Elmore Leonard in order to facilitate a closer reading of the relationship between artistic production and sociopolitical contexts in a decade of profound social and political change.Western formula heroes have traditionally protected versions of white, capitalist democracy, saving stage coaches from Indians, saving farmers from land barons, and saving towns from bullies. These heroes have never been without a certain degree of ambivalence, but in 1960s westerns they become increasingly reluctant about the communities their deeds serve, and their reluctance reflects specific sociopolitical issues ofthe decade. The westerns of this time reveal an awareness of the cultural and political limitations of western heroes, and the reluctance of these heroes also provides a means by which artists, producers, and audiences articulate anxieties about cultural and political alliances at large. Equations of small western towns with a unified notion of American community give way to a world where "community" could mean any number of disparategroups and a world where the hero's ability or desire to serve a given community is in question.There is a growing body of critical work that approaches westerns through the cultural contexts of their initial date of release, i.e., an approach to the western as "sociopolitical allegory." However, theories reading genre texts as reflections of their sociopolitical moment frequently isolate a single event to which their chosen texts respond, neither accounting for the variety of sociopolitical contexts surrounding the text nor accounting for significant artistic and media-specific trends informing the text's production. My dissertation proposes an author-based approach as a means of restoring artistic context to the study of the connections between genre and sociopolitical context. One of the contributions my study makes to discussions of the western as sociopolitical allegory lies in my attention to how the values and public images of artists contribute to sociopoliticalsubtext. Most interestingly, these artists often self-reflexively foreground their own sociopolitical anxieties alongside those of the heroes in their westerns. I am interested in the possibilities and limitations of these self-reflexive strategies as a means of sociopolitical commentary through a popular genre hero.
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