Literature and Culture: Advanced Topics

A study of the relations between literature and culture, with a specific thematic focus. Examples include Literature and Law, American Gothic, and Drugs, Literature and Culturet.

Current Semester Information

393A: AdvTps:Lit&Rel Tolerance

Literature and Culture: Advanced Topics: Literature & Religious Tolerance

393B: Lit &Cult:BeatGeneration

Literature and Culture: Advanced Topics: Lit and Cult of the Beat Generation

The "Beat Generation" marks a literary and cultural period from the early fifties to the mid-sixties in which rebellion against mainstream American postwar family values was beginning to surface. This course looks at the literature of this era in its cultural and political contexts, and examines the impact upon subsequent writers and artists. Some of the authors we'll cover will include Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso; African-American Beat writers LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Bob Kaufman; rebel women Diane DiPrima, Anne Waldman, and Hettie Jones. We will also see some Beat-era films (and representations of "beatniks" in the popular culture of the period) and hear some Beat-era music. Since this is also an "S" course, students will be expected to participate very actively in presentations, performances, and discussions.

393C: AdvTps:Drugs,Lit&Culture

Literature and Culture: Advanced Topics: Drugs, the Literary Imagination, and Related Questions of Consciousness and Culture

Humans of all cultures have used mind-altering drugs and written about them: to tell stories about new moods, perspectives, and behaviors; to explore aesthetic and metaphysical implications; to shape altered consciousness into religious ritual; to promote drugs as therapies; or to prohibit and even demonize their use. Drugs of all kinds--including things as routine as coffee and as exotic as LSD--have been ambiguously prescribed and outlawed, embraced as inspiration and shunned as affliction. In this course we will be studying literary works (fiction, nonfiction, poems), films, songs, and other sorts of cultural texts in which drugs figure prominently. I'm hopeful that we will generate a lot of good questions and discover new ways of thinking about this complex, provocative topic in literary and cultural studies.