(AMER 0094-04) Literature of the American Sixties – Ronna Johnson

This multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary course examines literature produced in and about the American Sixties. For our purposes this era is bounded by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling and the 1975 whiplash end of the contested and controversial U.S. War in Vietnam. These historical circumstances are held together within the postmodern interval in American arts and culture, itself an influential revolution in literary expression deriving from and reflecting its turbulent times. This is the literary period of the Beat movement, the Black Arts Movement, the New Journalism, second-wave feminism’s literature and manifestoes and the anti-war movement’s accounts of resistance, the period of psychedelic and Blues-Folk poetries, and pop culture narratives. Reading works from these schools and categories, we will consider the effects of the hybridization of forms and the appropriation of non-literary discourses to devise new and current literary texts, and study the formal malleability of this period’s works in order to come to some understanding of “the Sixties” as a comprehensive arts environment and generator of new perceptual experiences in literature. We study tropes of the period’s making carried in its titles and forms in texts as coincident and apparently unrelated as SCUM Manifesto (1967) and Soul On Ice (1969), as The Whole Earth Catalog (1968) and The Anarchist Cookbook (1971), as Play It As It Lays (1970) and The Bluest Eye (1970), as In Cold Blood (1966) and The Electric KoolAid Acid Test (1968), as Bob Dylan and “Bob Dylan” and more – how such works provide intertexts and narrative innovations that express the era beyond its historical cliches and easy dismissals to stand as foundational pillars of today’s autofiction and identitarian literary positions. How did the we of our moment emerge from the them of its precursors. This course fulfills the post-1860 English Major requirement.