COML2082 - American Literature in the Cold War

What happens when literature becomes a front in a global contest over national and ideological superiority? In the contest between the United States and the Soviet Union called the Cold War, literature was often co-opted to show the ways in which the US was more free and more supportive of artistic and personal expression than literature of the USSR. As a result, literature both became part of a national strategy of containment of Communism. Beginning with texts and films that represented American’s anxieties and fears about Communism and the atomic bomb, this course will show the ways in which the sense of crisis and anxiety drove literary experimentation and increasingly personal forms of poetry and prose. Alongside that experimentation, this course will examine works like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar to begin to see how freedom of expression reflected and resisted social and state efforts to contain demands for freedom from women and racial minorities. Finally, the course will end by looking at a range of experimental novels which worked to defy assumptions about cultural superiority and freedom of expression including Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.