ENG 4934 Fall 2020 Epstein

This seminar investigates the relationship between the cultural and historical conditions that characterize the two decades following World War II and developments in literature, as well as visual art, music, and other cultural forms. Blending literary analysis and cultural history, our goal is to explore how various cultural forms respond to, reflect, subvert, and shape the dynamics of post-World War II American culture. We will pay special attention to the radical, oppositional aesthetics that emerged in a wide range of fields, including fiction, poetry, music (jazz, rock), art, and movies. We will also consider the continuities and discontinuities between the allegedly placid 1950s and the turbulent 1960s.

Throughout we will be considering such questions as: how do these works address the contradictions of the American doctrine (or myth) of individualism during an “age of conformity,” and how do they respond to the changing nature of the family and community, the impact of popular culture, and shifting constructions of race and gender? In general, the course will explore how and why postwar American writers and artists invented unconventional aesthetic strategies to cope with changing ideas about the nature of the self, language and literary form, racial and sexual identity, and the nature of “America” itself, in a world undergoing dramatic transformations. Authors will likely include Shirley Jackson, John Cheever, Richard Yates, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Amiri Baraka, Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion.