The Sixties in Film, Fiction, and Poetry

I taught this course at Trinity College in Hartford, Spring semester 2012, and once a year and a half before. Moodle, mentioned below, is an open source course management system that Trinity uses.

This course focuses on the relationships between social movements and art (film, fiction, poetry). It is not an effort to survey ALL of the creative work associated with the Sixties, nor is it intended as an historical account of the period (though some understanding of the history is critical to what we will do). We will deal both with works created in the Sixties and works created about that time; one concern, in fact, is how they differ.

The social movements with which we will deal include the civil rights and black power movements, the anti-war and student movements, and the feminist and gay movements. These were deeply interrelated though somewhat separately defined. I use a loose definition of “The Sixties”: roughly from the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955) to the end of the war on Vietnam (1975).

This course is planned primarily as a graduate seminar, so there is a good deal of reading and a good deal of watching entailed. Be prepared. You will view one film every week. And you will also have a substantial reading assignment. Come to class having read the text(s) assigned, having seen the film, and prepared to talk about them.

There will be papers and presentations. We will discuss them in class.

Because this is a seminar, there are relatively few meetings. You can miss a class only because of extraordinary circumstances and then only if you have a legitimate excuse (e.g., you broke your back lifting all the books). Seriously: I expect everyone to be at all the classes ready to discuss the works we are viewing and reading.

Here are the books I have ordered, more or less in the order we will read them:

• • Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (Dell mass market paper—ISBN is 0-440-3 1488-7).

• • James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (Vintage—ISBN: 0-679-74472-X).

• • Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Penguin—ISBN: 0-452-28219-5).

• • Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5 (Dell—ISBN: 0-385-3384-6).

• • Margaret Earley Whitt, ed, Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement (U Georgia Press—ISBN: 978-0-8203-2851-5).

• • H. Bruce Franklin, ed, The Vietnam War in American Stories, Songs, and Poems (Bedford/ St. Martin’s—ISBN: 0-312-11552-0).

• • Yusef Kumunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau (Wesleyan University Press —ISBN: 0819511641).

• • Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Mariner Books—ISBN: 978-0-618-70641-9).

• • Lanford Wilson, Four Short Plays (Drama Play—ISBN: 978-0-822-213611).

• • Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle (Bantam—ISBN: 0-553-27886-X).

In addition, there will be a number of readings mounted on Moodle.

The films will be on reserve at the film and media center on Level 1 of the library. That means you will be able to view the films in the viewing rooms adjacent to the media center. If it is more convenient, you may wish to access some of the films in your local libraries, or even purchase copies of them—some of them are available, and some are on YouTube. You may wish to arrange with others in the class to share viewing times. Because there is generally only one copy of each film, DO NOT wait until the last minute to view it—you may find it already in use.

Course Syllabus

Jan. 23

• • In-class films, etc.: Operation Abolition and Operation Correction,

  • • http://www.archive.org/details/Operatio1961;

  • • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVQnFpzU5h8, and;

  • • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l00IAGwKjDE

Jan. 30

• • Reading: Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi

• • Film: Freedom Song

Feb. 6

• • Readings: James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time; Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet”; Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” http://abacus.bates.edu/admin/ofces/dos/mlk/letter.html; http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/frequent-docs/birmingham.pdf

• • Film: Berkeley in the Sixties

Feb. 13...