Meets with C701

(Bohemian Subcultures and the Cold War)

This seminar will focus its attention on the 1950s and early 60s, attempting throughout to develop an articulation between sexuality and the Cold War (among other efforts). The seminar will examine both the first Kinsey Report and the Wolfenden Report (Britain, 1957), texts that will surface throughout the term in the literature we read. We will also spend some time with the Frankfurt School Writers, especially Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), his revisiting of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), and with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which we will read together with Professor Comentale’s seminar.

This seminar will, of course, move beyond love and the bomb, sexuality and nuclear destruction, beyond Dr. Strangelove and Saboteur (though we might see some of these films if there is sufficient interest, especially insofar as Hitchcock is concerned). Specifically, the seminar will visit three subcultures in three countries: the Beats in America, the Angry Young Men and Ian Fleming in London, and the “McDaid’s” crowd in Dublin: Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, and J.P. Donleavy. Texts we shall read include:

Jack Kerouac, On the Road, The Dharma Bums
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Brendan Behan, The Hostage, Richard’s Cork Leg, The Quare Fellow
J.P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man
Patrick Kavanagh, The Great Hunger
Allen Ginsberg, Selected Poems
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind
Diane Di Prima , selected poems
Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love
John Osborne, Look Back in Anger
Samuel Beckett, Endgame, Happy Days, Krapp’s Last Tape

At various points, with Beckett, for example, a fourth site–Paris–will need to be added to our discussion, which will include brief considerations of Jean Genet (The Balcony) and excerpts from Sartre’s Saint Genet. And to our discussion on American Beats, we shall also add a consideration of McCarthyism, a veritable leitmotif in Ginsberg’s poetry of the period, of Bruce Connor’s multi-media work and the California Beats, and of the 1930s backgrounds of many of McCarthy’s most celebrated targets: Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, and so on.

We will write two papers for the course: a short (10-page) paper suitable for presentation at a conference and a longer (20-25 page) seminar paper, which might grow out of the shorter essay. Please feel free to stop by 435 BH for further discussion or questions–or for suggestions of other texts to include.