America Rewired: US Literature and Culture since the 1960s

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
• Convenor: Professor Joe Brooker
• Assessment: two 2500-word essays (50% each)

In this module we take as our starting point the dramatic transformation of the US cultural landscape that occurred in the 1960s. Against the backdrop of the explosion of second-wave feminism, the successes of the black civil rights movement, the deepening war in Vietnam and the looming nuclear threat, US writers and artists reacted to the times with a wave of experimentation and innovation.

We will explore the reverberations of this tumultuous decade, alongside new developments in literature and culture, into the latter decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. We consider this history in three sections: first, key writers of the 1960s and early 1970s; second, developments in the genre of crime writing; third, the US short story since 1970.

Indicative syllabus

New voices in American writing

• Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
• Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
• Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-5 (1969)
• Toni Morrison, Sula (1973)

Underworld USA: crime fiction

• Ross MacDonald, The Galton Case (1959)
• Patricia Highsmith, The Glass Cell (1964)
• Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990)

The US short story since 1970

• Using the Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, ed. John Freeman (2021)
• 1970s-1980s
• 1990s-2000s
• 2000s-2010

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• identify and discuss the key literary texts and thematic issues in American literature and culture since the 1960s
• analyse and assess the work of a range of American writers from across the period
• understand the relationship between literature, history and politics within the context of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century US literature
• demonstrate an awareness of how literature and language produces and reflects cultural change and difference.