01 CAC TTH5 12154 LAWRENCE SC-214
The Sixties
The 1960s were a decade of major upheaval in the United States. A series of liberation movements challenged many of the U.S.’s core political institutions, at the same time that the nation entered into a prolonged and divisive war in Vietnam. In the cultural realm, a generation of young writers and filmmakers sought to engage the urgent social issues of the period, inventing new aesthetic forms and techniques to address them. In this course, we will look at a range of literary works, films, and historical documents from and about the 1960s, paying close attention to the interplay between aesthetics and politics in these texts. Authors studied may include Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Thomas Pynchon, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Ursula Le Guin, Tom Wolfe, and Toni Morrison. Films may include Bonnie and Clyde, Killer of Sheep, and Apocalypse Now.