US Literature after World War II

Catalog description

Students explore fiction, poetry and drama composed since World War II, with special attention to the shift from modernism to postmodernism. How has American literature in the twentieth century responded to and been influenced by the civil rights and feminist movements, the Vietnam War, anti-communism, consumer culture, environmentalism, scientific and technological progress, economic crisis, and the ever-looming threat of the nuclear bomb? What are the intersections between literary culture and popular culture, and between literary culture and the state, in the high-water years of the “American Century”? Approaches vary with instructor, but authors studied are likely to include Auster, Baldwin, Barth, Bishop, Carson, Carver, DeLillo, Didion, Ellison, Erdrich, Graham, Heller, Kingston, Levine, Morrison, Nabokov, O'Connor, Ozick, Plath, Pynchon, Rich, Roth, Silko, Spiegelman, Stone, Vonnegut, Wallace, Walker and White.