Third Year Module
Module Leader: Trevor Grimshaw
Description
This interdisciplinary module will offer students the opportunity to examine a key period in the development of modern American society. Drawing in particular on historical, sociological, literary and popular cultural texts, it seeks to draw out the complexities and contradictions of an era in which the consolidation of the United States’ position as a global superpower was nevertheless accompanied by intense self-doubt.
Examining texts, discourses and representations of and about the American 1950s, the module will place particular emphasis on literary and filmic texts as imaginative responses to and interventions in the dilemmas and contradictions of the period. Whilst such texts cannot be treated merely as historical evidence, they nevertheless offer powerful insights into the values, beliefs and ‘structures of feeling’ at work in American society of the time, lending weight to the notion that societies – and most especially the United States – can be understood not just as clear-cut entities but also as mythical powers.