Swept out of a Dead Frontier: Apocalypse, Disappearance and the Uncertain Future of the Contemporary Western

This critical study of Annie Proulx's Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 (2004), Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men (2005), and Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) uncovers the disconnections between Americans' national myths regarding the West and the challenging realities standing in the way of its sustainable future. Jeremy Wattles reflects on three different portraits of the West (Wyoming, Texas, Washington), and outlines the religious and cultural antecedents to their declarations of apocalypse. His text recognizes these fictions as a sobering check on a stereotypical, nationalistic ideology of self-reliance and providential progress, and offers a reappraisal of American identity in the face of modern economic, environmental and social concerns.