The Eighties: Earnestness to Irony

From "White Noise" to "Working Girl," Duran Duran to Public Enemy, this course explores the culture, rhetoric, and politics of the 1980s through literature, film, music, and television. What kind of counterculture, if any, emerges from a decade of conservatism, greed and the AIDS epidemic? What, in short, made the 80s unique—and what is the decade's afterimage? Students should register for ENGL 0710S S01 and may be assigned to conference sections by the instructor during the first week of class.