Course details

Name: ENGL - 339

Title: POSTWAR AMERICAN LITERATURE: 1945-1990

Section: 01

Semester: Spring - 2019

Credits: 3

Description:
In this class, we’ll study literature that emerged from the United States at the height of its global power—emerging victorious from World War II with a vigorous economy and a booming population, the US became the world’s most powerful country.
Yet the art that has endured throughout this period tended to be critical of the US. Discussing the most forceful literature of this early part of the 20th century, literary critic Lionel Trilling noted that what unified the literature “is the bitter line of hostility to civilization which runs through it.” What happens when we take such a hostile body of literature and call it “great”? How does the anti-institutional energy of American literature become part of the narrative we tell of American literature and American life?
In this class, we’ll encounter important works that are, in one way or another, critical of the society they emerge from, but we’ll also look at works that offer interesting stylistic approaches to the critical task they take on. This is the other narrative we can create—one where stylistic innovation becomes the norm, which causes other writers to supplant or tinker with literary form, to open it to new possibilities. In this component of the course, we’ll think about approaches to literature we can loosely tie together (or that have been tied together for us by literary critics) or what we can say about the impact of these stylistic gestures.
Representative authors include Morrison, Pynchon, Nabokov, Roth, Robinson, Acker, Vonnegut, Baldwin, and Kingston.

Last updated on 2018-10-12 By Gonzalez Jeffrey (gonzalezje)

Schedule: Monday,Wednesday From 11:30 am To 12:45 pm

Graduation requirements:

• Any Literature (1e)
• Genre Study (Fiction)
• Other American (TE 1d)
• Post-1900 (1d)
• Ethnic Studies (3b)
• Women and Gender Studies (3c)

Teaching Faculty: Gonzalez Jeffrey (gonzalezje)

Is course canceled: No