Course Description

The 1960s have taken hold of the national consciousness as few decades have. 60s clothing styles--or what we think of as such--have returned to fashion several times, 60s music still plays on the radio, major films look to the 60s for their subject matter, and political pundits on both the left and the right invoke the era as a major turning point for the nation. Whether or not our collective memory of the 60s is accurate, however, is open to dispute. In this course, we will try to disentangle the 60s from our contemporary myth of the 60s by examining the literature which arose out of the main protest movements of the time (the Civil Rights movement, 1960s feminism, anti-war protests, and the counterculture).

Course Goals

All courses in the "Literature" category of the general education program must attempt to do the following:

• enable students to appreciate the structure and style of a literary text
• encourage students actively to engage their imaginative faculties when they read
• enable students to connect the literature they read to the cultural and social context in which it was written, or the context it portrays
• develop students' abilities to make and defend thoughtful, evaluative judgments about literary texts.

In addition, this particular course is intended to help you to

• understand some of the major concerns and ideas of 1960s literature,
• grapple with the challenges those ideas pose to our sense of identity, community, and the social order, and
• decide for yourself how relevant 1960s literature is to our lives today.

Required Texts

available from the bookstore:

• Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman
• Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems
• Michael Herr, Dispatches
• LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Dutchman and The Slave
• Sylvia Plath, Ariel
• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
• Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

available on reserve:

• Betty Friedan, from The Feminine Mystique, "The Problem that Has No Name" and "The Happy Housewife Heroine"
• "Star Trek: City on the Edge of Forever"

Course Requirements

Your grade will be based upon the following:

• 1 micro essay (8%)
• 2 short papers (46% total; one may count more than the other if one assignment proves to be more complex than the other)
  • topics for paper 1
  • topics for paper 2
• a midterm (23%)
• a final exam (23%)

The micro essay and the papers should be handed in via Moodle in .doc or .docx format. If you don't use Microsoft Word, talk to me and we'll work out a different arrangement.

All work will be graded on a 0-100 scale, where 90-100 = A, 80-89 = B, 70-79 = C, 60-69 = D, and 0-50 = F. The highest three numbers in a range are equivalent to a plus grade (e.g. 87-89 = B+); the lowest three are equivalent to a minus (e.g. 90-92 = A-).

Attendance: No more than 3 absences for any reason, including illness and university sponsored events, are allowed. I will deal with attendance problems on a case-by-case basis, but I reserve the right to lower your final grade by one third of a grade for each class missed beyond the 3 course limit.

Participation in discussion is important in this class. Although there is no separate grade rubric for participation, active, thoughtful participation in class will raise a borderline grade, while passive or disruptive participation will lower one. (A borderline grade is defined as a grade within .5 of a point of the cutoff between two grades. For example, 90 is the cutoff between B+ and A-; 89.5 - 90.5 is the borderline range between the two grades.)

Late work: Your grade on a late assignment will be lowered by 3 points (out of 100) for every calendar day it is late, up to a maximum of 30 points. Because an F at 50 will bring down a grade much less than an F at 0, it is nearly always better to turn in an assignment late than not to turn it in at all.

Plagiarism will affect your grade in one of two ways. If you turn in a paper which is plagiarized in minor or unintentional ways (e.g. you use the language of the source you are writing about without quotes), the paper will receive a 0, and we will discuss plagiarism until it is clear that you understand what it is and how to avoid it. You may be able to rewrite such a paper for a higher grade if there is enough time left in the term. However, if you turn in a paper which is plagiarized blatantly, at length or with apparent intent to deceive, you will receive an F in the course regardless of any other grades you have received, and I will file an Academic Dishonesty Report with the Associate Provost.

Course Schedule

Th 1/6 -Introduction.

Part 1: Black Consciousness, Black Rage

1/11 - LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Dutchman
1/13 - Baraka continued. Visit from Study Abroad representative.

1/18 - Baraka continued.
1/20 - Gwendolyn Brooks, from Selected Poems: all poems from The Bean Eaters, 69-112. Micro-essay due.

1/25 - Brooks continued. Read in Selected Poems: VII, VIII, and XV from "The Womanhood" section of Annie Allen (59-62, 65-66).
1/27 - no class; I'll be at a conference.

2/1 - Brooks continued. Read "Riders to the Blood-Red Wrath," 115-118.
2/3 - catch-up day.

Part 2: Perceptions of War

2/8 - Michael Herr, Dispatches
2/10 - Herr continued.

2/15 - Herr continued.
2/17 - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

2/22 - Vonnegut continued. Paper 1 due.
2/24 - Vonnegut continued.

Part 3: The (Re)-Emergence of Feminism

3/1 - Betty Friedan, "The Problem That Has No Name," "The Happy Housewife Heroine"; Sylvia Plath, Ariel

3/3 - Plath continued.

3/8 - Plath continued.
3/10 - Midterm Exam

3/15 - 3/17 - Spring Break

3/22 - Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman.
3/24 - Atwood continued.

3/29 - Atwood continued.
3/31 - catch-up day or on to Hoffman and Pynchon. Paper 2 due.

Part 4: Countercultures and the Interconnected View

4/5 - “Testimony of Abbie Hoffman"; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49.
4/7 - Pynchon continued.

4/12 - Pynchon continued.
4/14 - Pynchon continued.

4/19 - Last day of class.

4/21, 8 - 10 AM - Final Exam.