1 Matthew Jones 2/3/19 Demystifying the Myth: The Western’s Classical Phase So much has been written about the classical phase of the Western. Genre fans and for the most part, critics alike have accepted with open arms the idea of a temporally delimited phase in the genre's evolution wherein its "classical" roots had then been established and set. Questions of the actual validity of this common-held notion are often few and far between and its convenience as a critical descriptor and ideological counterbalance appears to justify its existence. The issue is not the lack of clear signifiers appearing in earlier Westerns across an expanse of films that can readily be understood as of a type of classicism, rather it is the idea of a linear evolution that the genre followed from its earliest origins in literature and the screen to the contemporary era. Even more problematic perhaps is the conception of a circumscribed classical phase birthed in the literature of James Fenimore Cooper and Owen Wister, then carried over to the cinema into the early silent Westerns of John Ford and others before meeting its demise when the genre became increasingly self-conscious and non-traditional in the post-World War II era. Tag Gallagher's aim at demystifying this conception appeared in his "Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral: Problems in the 'Evolution' of the Western" where he deconstructs the problematic view of a chronological and equally orderly evolution of the Western. Gallagher points out the flawed theory of generic evolution posed by highly-influential scholars and critics such as Andre Bazin,