The politics of popular westerns are surprising in substance and
significance, especially of late. Cowboy Politics shows how
westerns in literature, cinema, and television face the challenges
of Western Civilization even more than the perils of American
frontiers. Its strategy is to compare key westerns with major
theories of modern and postmodern politics. So it analyzes novels
from Owen Wister to Zane Grey and Larry McMurtry. It focuses on
films from the western revival beginning in the 1990s and featuring
Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, while its interest in TV stretches
from singing cowboys and Gunsmoke to David Milch's Deadwood.
Critics are apt to find in westerns the modern politics of Thomas
Hobbes and John Locke. They tap devices of individuality,
rationality, contract, sovereign enforcement, and representation to
overcome the chaotic violence of a wild zone. Cowboy Politics
examines how westerns often find such measures insufficient to tame
the West as a culture of honor and anger that deteriorates into
feud-al vengeance. Instead westerns see the West as the sunset land
that is already growing old and moving on. So westerns seek fresh
starts informed by comparing civilizations more than demonizing
savages. Westerns worry that modern politics devolve into
exploitation, oppression, spectacle, and terror. So they pursue
supplements in such postmodern politics as republicanism,
perfectionism, populism, feminism, and environmentalism. Especially
westerns explore politics of persuasive speech-in-action-in-public,
doing beauty, and self-reliance in the modes of Hannah Arendt and
Ralph Waldo Emerson. The first two chapters of Cowboy Politics
explain how westerns do political theory for popular audiences by
making many of our myths: the symbolic stories of individuals and
communities which we live daily. The next three chapters trace the
initially modern theories of government in many westerns. Then
western turns to republican honor, rhetoric, response-ability, and
character tracking occupy the following four chapters. And these
set the stage for another four chapters on western attention to
postmodern terror, mythmaking, celebrity, spectacle, and
forgiveness. The final two chapters analyze how "late,"
"satirical," and "transformative" westerns develop realist defenses
for their surprisingly postmodern politics.
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