From 1944 till the end of the 1960s two movements emerged on the American literary scene. These two movements, the beat generation and the so-called Confessionals emphasized subjectivity and the personal experience. The beat generation originated from a group formed around Allen Ginsberg at Colombia University in 1944. This group of young writers, including William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, criticized the political climate and the consumer culture of those days, and was inspired by Afro-American and immigrant culture. By the end of the 1950s a new generation of writers came to hit the scene. These confessional poets, or “madhoude muses” drew on personal confession and psychological introspection. During this course we will explore a wide variety of texts by prominent writers from the beat generation (Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, LeRoi Jones, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, Anne Waldman, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso) and by important confessional poets (Robert Lowell, Theodore Roetke, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop). We will investigate in particular how the individual is related to society in these texts, and what tension exists between public and private discourse. Moreover, attention will be paid to the ways in which writers from either group deal with issues of ethnicity and gender, to the ways in which these two groups interacted and to the ways in which they experimented with literary forms and genres.
Timetable
The timetable will be available from June 1st on the internet.
Method of Instruction
Two-hour seminar per week.
Required reading
*_The Norton Anthology of American Literature,_ Vol. E., 7th edition. *William Burroughs, Junk, Penguin, 2003. *Allen Ginsberg, Selected Poems, 1947-1995, Perennial Classics, 2001. *Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones, Grove Press, 1997. *Leroi Jones, The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, Thunder\‘s Mouth Press, 1999. *Robert Lowell, Selected Poems, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2006. *Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Penguin Classics, 2003. *Sylvia Plath, _The Bell Jar, _Faber and Faber, 2005. *Dianne di Prima, Memoirs of a Beatnik, Marion Boyars Publishers, 2002. *Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems, Mariner, 1999. *_The Portable Beat Reader_. Penguin, 2003.
Examination
An oral presentation (30%) and a final essay of approximately 3000 words (70%).
Information
Department of English, P.N. van Eyckhof 4, building 1168, room 102c, tel. 071 527 2144, email: english@let.leidenuniv.nl.