ENGL 422 - Confession and Rebellion: American Literature in the 1950s

An investigation of the innovative forces of post-World War II American literature. The course will review the tumultuous decade of the 1950s during which time the United States was catapulted into a Cold War with the Soviet Union and a congruent episode of anticommunist hysteria known as McCarthyism. This initiated the new nuclear age created with the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. It was also a decade defined by the struggle with Jim Crow racism and the emergence of a new Civil Rights movement, the birth of the second wave of feminism, and the emergence of a rich range of cultural criticism focused on issues including the social construction of the American family, corporate and suburban conformism, sexual repression, and the destructive capacities of the new military industrial complex. Out of this charged political and cultural situation, writers created some of the most innovative literary works in modern American history.

Credits: 1.00
Corequisite: None
Prerequisites: None
Major/Minor Restrictions: None
Class Restriction: None
Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression
Liberal Arts CORE: None

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