Time Schedule:
Amanda P. Golden
ENGL 111
Seattle Campus
Study and practice of good writing; topics derived from reading and discussing stories, poems, essays, and plays.
Class description
English 111: "Composition: Literature: The Scandalous Fifties" is an introduction to academic arguments and college-level writing. The fifties were a decade of conservatism and conformity. Such novels as Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1957) depict the middle class workers that filled offices in New York skyscrapers and newly built homes in the suburbs. At the same time, however, writers were responding to what Robert Lowell called, “the tranquilized fifties” in poetry and fiction challenging critics’ expectations regarding appropriate form and content. In this course we will read poetry and fiction that complicates our image of the fifties. We will begin with an introduction to the fifties home and workplace in such texts as The Organization Man (1956). Portions of Grace Metalious’s bestseller, Peyton Place (1958), which exposed the less conservative behavior of a small New England town, and Vladimir Nabokov’s eternally controversial Lolita (1958) will present different images of everyday life and scandal. In the second half of the course we will read a range of poets from the late fifties and early sixties, such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and Allen Ginsberg. Many of the poets we will read use the form of the poem to address their own experiences ranging from motherhood to mental illness. We will also encounter the counterculture of the fifties and the Beats.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
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Class assignments and grading
