ENGL 90702 - Fiction of The Cold War

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

English

Description:

This course will examine urban literatures written by and depicting American women during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Through selected readings we will investigate intersections between race, gender, sexuality and nation during the end of WWII and early cold war period. Of key interest will be the place of American women within the concurrent political discourses of containment and expansionism. We will investigate the types of cold war "warriors" American women were ideally expected to be and the ways American women writers responded to these models. Taking as a point of departure the standard account of this period, which focuses primarily on the re-domestication of the archetypical white American woman after WWII, this class will relocate discussions of the homebound American woman to the international arena. We will consider cold war ideas about American women's proper "place" in the context of the global imaginary propounded by anti-communist U.S. foreign policies. Paradigms such as motherhood, domesticity, and the idea of the "dutiful daughter" might have been restrictive for American women, but they simultaneously functioned as expansionist discourses by assigning women key roles in a global dissemination of American power. We will investigate how the need to form bonds with other nations in order to define the "free world" as an entity worth defending not only fostered anti-communism, but also nurtured a notion of mutual obligation between the U.S. and its dependent nations. Incorporating readings of literature, Hollywood film, television, and popular magazines, we will investigate how discourses developed to constrain women's roles also reveal how female agency was implicitly racialized. Authors may include Mine Okubo, Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Thompson Patterson, Sylvia Plath, Jean Stafford, Marguerite Oswald, Lorraine Hansberry, Betty Friedan, Ann Petry, Margaret Walker, Elizabeth Bishop, Olive Higgins Prouty, and Shirley Graham. Possible films include So Proudly We Hail, The Red Menace, Imitation of Life, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, South Pacific, The Ugly American, The King and I, and Never Let Me Go.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.nd.edu

Phone Number:

(574) 631-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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