Meditations in an Emergency: New York City in the Fifties
In the 1950s, New York City was a magnet for writers and artists who challenged and celebrated America’s changing loves, ambitions, and traditions. They charted the rising starpower of a city whose Madison Avenue advertising agencies and television studios increasingly shaped the dreams of a growing nation and a changing world. In their stories and poems, paintings, and films, New Yorkers made art from their city’s raw energies, its rhythms, textures, passions, cultures and personalities. In this class students explore the work of writers who question what it means to be “normal” and who ask what happens when rules of behavior are upheld and sometimes bent or broken. Students will rediscover meditations on love, faith, women’s rights, consumerism, fashion, race, sexuality, and politics that still activate some of today’s most urgent conversations.
Reading list:
Summer Reading: Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day
Dawn Powell, The Wicked Pavillion
Allen Ginsberg, Howl and other Poems (Selections)
Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency (Selections)
Shakespeare, The Tempest
Selected poetry and prose by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, John Cheever, James Merrill, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, LeRoi Jones, Langston Hughes, Barbara Guest, and John Ashbery. The class will also view and discuss Billy Wilder’s film The Apartment.
Visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, to look at 1950s art, support the curriculum.
Madwomen and Marriages: Introduction to Women’s Literature
Is there a woman in this text? If you look closer, she might turn out to be dead (Caroline Frankenstein), mad (Ophelia), too powerless to matter much (Phoebe Caulfield), obsessively vengeful (Abigail Williams), or just plain missing. So, what does all this mean? Exploring the answers to this and other questions, students read a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary selection of texts to investigate how female characters voice their experiences and respond to the societal constraints imposed on them. Students evaluate the critical observation of the so-called sentimentality of women’s literature, with plots that culminate in a marriage or a death, or both. After a brief introduction to feminist criticism, students will consider such questions as: What is women’s writing? How do we evaluate it? Do “women’s texts” differ from men’s in content or form or both or neither? These questions will help to inform analyses of a dizzying variety of plots involving brides, madwomen, heroines, and other women tackling domesticity, the war between the sexes, and issues of autonomy, among other concerns.
Reading list:
Summer Reading: Kate Chopin, The Awakening and selections from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies
Virginia Woolf, selections from A Room of One’s Own
Selected writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, including “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman
Selected poetry, prose, and drama by Sharon Olds, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, Susan Glaspell, Kate Chopin, Sylvia Plath, Roald Dahl, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Faulkner, Nellie Wong, Alaide Foppa, Alice Munro, Emily Dickinson, Carol Ann Duffy, and others.