ENGL 274 - American Literature 1945-Present

The complacent malaise of the Cold War, the turmoil of Vietnam and the Sixties, and the postmodern fascination with computers and visual culture-all of these have had radical consequences for the American literary form. While questioning boundaries between high and low culture, image and reality, and identity and difference, recent American writers work against a pervasive sense of fragmentation to imagine new relations between community and personal desire. The course will consider authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Ralph Ellison, Walker Percy, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Robert Stone, Thomas Pynchon, John Guare, Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, Art Spiegelman, and Neal Stephenson. Alternate years. (4 Credits)