The American 1950s: Conformity Culture and Its Discontents

Popular views of the American 1950s run the gamut from seeing the decade as an idyllic time before the turbulent 1960s to a more jaded view of an era of conformity and paranoia cultivated in the name of a “non-ideological” anti-Communist consensus. In this course, we will examine novels, poems, plays, films, and other modes of cultural production from the 1950s, in order to come to a deeper understanding of the American 1950s as a decade that encompassed both the mainstream culture of suburbs and Cold Warriors and also the countercultural tendencies of groups like the Beats.
Texts
Our first texts will be two classic representations of 1950s conformity culture, Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men. After establishing that baseline, we will examine texts that offer a variety of challenges to the ideological consensus of the 1950s, such as Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation of that novel, Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, and Edward Dmytryk’s The Caine Mutiny. We will then turn our attention to the American response to Communism, particularly as exemplified in texts addressing the phenomenon of McCarthyism, including Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront. Further pursuing this aspect of American culture in the 1950s, we will consider metaphorical representations in 1950s science fiction of fears centered on Communism and the prospect of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, in texts such as Howard Fast’s “The Martian Shop,” Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still. In the final weeks of the semester, we will turn our attention to the break from mainstream 1950s culture made by authors of the Beat generation, studying texts such as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.
Requirements
Our class meetings will center on vigorous discussion of the texts we study, so regular attendance and participation are required. The course will also require regular completion of a number of short writing assignments, including assignments to be completed on the online class journal. Longer writing assignments will include two essays of four to six pages each, and a final paper of eight to ten pages.