Courses

This survey looks at the daring & challenging literary forms that, in concert with contemporaneous new political forms (the non-violent demonstrations in the South in the early 60s) and new modes of painting (the "action painting" of Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism in the mid-50s) put the vulnerabilities of the human body front and center. Toppling classical hierarchies that had long enthroned the mind as sovereign, American writers open up subjectivity to a loss of control, as they suffer, survive and enjoy the risks of contingency, of cross-racial affiliations, of urgent improvisation amidst both the racism and the anonymity of urban life, as they pursue the censored, existential moments of doubt and exhilaration inhabiting the surface triumphalism of the post-war era. Flannery O'Connor, Carson, McCullers, Toni Morrison, Frank O'Hara, Tennessee Williams,  Philip Roth, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, will be some of the authors read .