The 1980s A Return to the Golden Age

The 1980s begins with the last of the Kennedy brothers, Sen. Edward Kennedy, losing his ’79 presidential candidate election bid, and with the Democratic Party and President Jimmy Carter ultimately losing the 1980 election to Republican Ronald Reagan. Reagan, the oldest ever elected president, touting the platform of the -Reagan Revolution”, decried the 1980s and his political and social campaign as a force that would change the morale of America, both financially and morally. His vision and the narrative of his campaign espoused a long-delayed return to the good old times, to -normalcy”, back to the golden 1950s, an era before the decades of supposed debauchery and social decay found in 1960s and ‘70s. While Reaganism sought out a social change through politics that would adhere to conservative values, with conservatism meaning the want to literally conserve traditions or hierarchies that are already in place, other both slightly and greatly differing cultural ideologies and political philosophies found their outputs in other facets of culture. In this course we will be learning about the cultural output that literature contributed during this decade. We will be in part learning more about the era of the American 1980s by reading political texts, some from President Reagan himself, and other literary texts that both respond positively and negatively to the Reaganite social and political agenda. Some of the literary texts we will be looking at include Bret Easton Ellis’s -Less Than Zero”, John Kennedy Toole’s -A Confederacy of Dunces”, Tom Wolfe’s -The Bonfire of the Vanities”, Allan David Bloom’s -The Closing of the American Mind”, Douglas Coupland’s -Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture”, and Toni Morrison’s -Beloved”. Texts will be available on Moodle. Anglistik - Amerikanistik BA-LKM: Modul 1 abgeschlossen For 2 KP: Regular attendance and participation; short group presentation; in-class written assignments For 5 KP: Same as above except that one in-class assignment will be expanded into an essay For 7 KP: Same as above except that one in-class assignment well be expanded into a research paper Universität Siegen SoSe 2011 M.A. Hulse Seth Thomas M.A