Following the climactic gunfight in the saloon at the end of the classic Western film Shane (1953), Shane rides alone into the mountains, into the virgin land, leaving behind the farmers he has protected as they sought to cultivate what was once the open range. Like many American heroes, Shane, as Huck Finn puts it, lights out for the territory, searching in the untamed wilderness for the lost Eden, for the longed-for brave new world. In this talk, Georgetown University Teaching Professor Emeritus Michael Collins will examine America’s imaginative encounter with the putatively virgin land just beyond the settlement and look at the paradoxical response that the United States has traditionally made, in the past and in our own time, to the abundance of open land it believes it has been given.
This event is sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project and the Georgetown Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University with Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. It is part of the series Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference.
