English 190

Other Readings and Media

See below.

Description

This class will explore the literature, film, and art of the 1960s in America, with a particular focus on the complex interactions between various forms of modernism and the social movements whose politics, aesthetics, and cultural ambitions most powerfully challenged the conventions of everyday life in the period. The 1960s are regularly thought of as a time of “revolution,” a decade defined by such iconic struggles as the Civil Rights Movement, the opposition to the Vietnam War, and various contests for power on the part of women, gays and lesbians, Chicanos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. While the legacies and mythologies of these movements are especially strong here in the Bay Area, we will be just as concerned with the global contours of 1960s culture as it registered in the United States, and with transformations in high art and cinema that reflected on the internal tensions and limits of radical politics.

Our texts will include novels by Thomas Pynchon, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and James Baldwin; poetry by Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, Gwendolyn Brooks, and the writers assembled for crucial anthology, The New American Poetry; and films including Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as works of experimental cinema by Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage and more.

Please read the paragarph about English 190 on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.