Training in writing expository prose. Further instruction in expository writing in conjunction with reading literature. Satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement.

'We tell ourselves stories in order to live,' writes Joan Didion at the start of 'The White Album,' the first and eponymous entry in her second essay collection, published in 1979. But for Didion what above all characterizes the period her essay means to survey--the ten years, that is, from '1968-1978,' named at the essay's conclusion--is that the stories we might tell about it are necessarily inadequate. This is not because we ourselves are essentially inadequate as storytellers, or because we do not yet have enough distance from the period in question, or enough material on it, to reconstruct it with sufficient objectivity. We cannot tell any meaningful stories about this period, Didion contends, because the disorder and violence that inaugurated it condemn it to unintelligibility. And hence a remarkable if obvious aspect of Didion's essay. Though by its conclusion it is positioned as a reflection on the Seventies, that decade is only approached obliquely through signal phenomena of the Sixties in their decline, from Jim Morrison showing up late and vatic to rehearsal in vinyl pants, through the escalating violence waged against the Black Panthers by the U.S. state, to Didion's own nervous breakdown and subsequent withdrawal with her family to a house by the Pacific. Didion's account is of course limited, for a number of reasons. The essay-form itself disallows the intensive analysis necessary for an adequately critical periodization of the Seventies; the phenomena adduced as the essay proceeds are of narrow provenance, emerging as they do with few exceptions from a specific area of California social life. Nonetheless Didion's contemporary diagnosis has since proved influential. Subsequent accounts of the Seventies likewise frame it as a period in which the emancipatory promises customarily associated with the Sixties, especially with its flashpoint year 1968, were broken. Notwithstanding undeniable instances of defeat and reaction, contemporary scholarship has attempted to retrieve from the Seventies a complementary record of subversion, so that we might keep in sight certain styles and practices of resistance rather than only the emergent conservatism to which they were responding, and whose aftereffects we in many ways continue to negotiate. By the end of this class I do not expect us to be able to adjudicate the claims for a 'radical' or for a 'reactionary' understanding of the Seventies, or to argue convincingly that a particular text exemplifies it. The upshot of this class, to repurpose Didion's phrasing, is to figure out for ourselves: what kinds of stories could we tell about the Long Seventies? We will accordingly encounter a diverse set of texts from this period which in one way or another respond however indirectly to some of its key social and political developments, from liberation movements formed along axes of race, gender, and sexuality, to the consolidating forces of reaction which these movements sought to contest. Readings are likely if not yet certain to include novels by J.G. Ballard, Thomas Disch, Ann Quin, Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, John Berger; poetry by J.H Prynne, Douglas Oliver, John Ashbery, John Wieners, Adrienne Rich, Bernadette Mayer, Elizabeth Bishop, Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka, Linton Kwesi Johnson, E.K. Brathwaite; and essays and criticism by Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdige, Fredric Jameson, Alice Echols, Kristin Ross, etc. As this class is an R1B, its pedagogical objective is to develop and focus individual practices of research and argumentation. Assignments are likely to include regular bCourses posts, a midterm paper, and a final paper (preceded both by a written proposal and by an informal presentation).

Requisites

• Previously passed an R_A course with a letter grade of C- or better. Previously passed an articulated R_A course with a letter grade of C- or better. Score a 4 on the Advanced Placement Exam in English Literature and Composition. Score a 4 or 5 on the Advanced Placement Exam in English Language and Composition. Score of 5, 6, or 7 on the International Baccalaureate Higher Level Examination in English.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills