“Gotta be Goin’ On” the mythical vision of America’s Land

In a new Future of the Humanities Project event series — A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment — we delve into the topical area of our environment. In recent years, we have rightly heard much about the world’s environmental problems, dangers, and disasters. However, in this series, we will invite speakers to explore the ways in which art and literature have foregrounded the inspirational beauty, delicacy, and strength of the natural world.

Following the climactic gunfight in the saloon at the end of the classic Western film Shane (1953), Shane tells Little Joe he’s “gotta be goin’ on.” In the final scene, 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, Michael Collins will focus on the role that the putatively virgin land, just beyond the settlement, has played in the American imagination in the past and in our own time. Collins will also look at the paradoxical response that the United States has traditionally made to the abundance of open land it believes it has been given.

Participants:

Michael Collins is a teaching professor of English and dean emeritus at Georgetown University. He has published essays on Anglo-Welsh poetry in Poetry Wales, World Literature Today, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and the Anglo-Welsh Review. He is an honorary fellow of Wrexham Glyndwr University, University of Wales, and a recipient of Georgetown University’s Presidential Medal and its Bunn Award for Outstanding Teaching.

Kathryn Temple (moderator) is a professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University where she has taught since 1994. She specializes in the study of law and the humanities. Among her publications are Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England (2019) and the co-edited Research Handbook on Law and Emotions (2021). Her humanities outreach activities include work with military veterans and the incarcerated.

Michael Scott (moderator) is senior dean, fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, college adviser for postgraduate students, and a member of the Las Casas Institute. He also serves as senior adviser to the president of Georgetown University. Scott previously was the pro-vice-chancellor at De Montfort University and founding vice-chancellor of Wrexham Glyndwr University.

Free and open to all. Registration is required.

 

Contact:
Las Casas Institute with Georgetown University
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk