ENG 2076 American Literature After 1945
This course explores some of the common intellectual preoccupations, historical experiences, and stylistic tendencies among Americans writing after 1945. Unit One investigates variety of responses to World War II. We begin with several figures (Salinger, Roth, Malamud, Vonnegut) to explore war's impact on ethnic solidarity, love, death, and the nature of time. Then we turn to members of a growing counterculture, "Beats" and feminists (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Plath), who resist disciplines of conformity during the era of the Cold War. Unit Two focuses on the relationship of literary language to historical memory and physical violence in three profoundly beautiful and disturbing works by Nabokov, Morrison, and McCarthy. Unit Three considers the fate of the post-nuclear family in an America that has become fully immersed in irony and mass media and lacks a secure foundation in supernatural belief (Robinson, Delillo, Saunders, and Eisenberg). The course re-enforces close reading skills and encourages students to construct narratives about the shared assumptions and conflicts of this vital period in American literary history.