WesMaps - Wesleyan University Catalog 2020-2021       Summer Session       Winter Session       Home       Archive       Search
CS92PROD
The New York Intellectuals
ENGL 376
Fall 2020 not offered

This course is a research seminar on the lives and work of the small group of mainly Jewish left-wing intellectuals who reshaped American culture in the two decades after World War II. We will consider how it was that a small group of poor Jewish kids, who had grown up thinking themselves marginal to American society, ended up becoming among the most revered and influential intellectuals of the postwar era. Our main focus will be on the development of their ideas about art, politics, and culture and on the way their ideas bore fruit in some of the important literary expression of the postwar decades. But we will also consider the sociological and political factors that help explain their rise to influence. Among the writers whose work we will discuss will be Woody Allen, James Baldwin, Daniel Bell, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Clement Greenberg, Elizabeth Hardwick, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Irving Kristol, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, and Lionel Trilling. Readings will include critical essays, novels, poems, memoirs, and short stories. Viewings of paintings, photographs, and documentary films will be recommended.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (CJST-MN)

Last Updated on MAR-28-2024
Contact wesmaps@wesleyan.edu to submit comments or suggestions. Please include a url, course title, faculty name or other page reference in your email ? Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459