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Course Description

Summary

The 1960s and 70s have been so thoroughly trivialized by the culture wars that Timothy Leary’s mantra ‘Turn on, tune in and drop out’ has become the era’s defining slogan. But the counter-culture helped produce some of the most genre-breaking literature we have, and this course will dive into the alternative canon for a long, strange trip among the famous, the forgotten, and the just plain weird. We’ll read work by the era’s most direct precursors, the Beats (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg); ride with the Merry Pranksters (Ken Kesey); protest literary tradition with misfits like Norman Mailer, Grace Paley, Rudy Wulitzer, and Richard Brautigan; and revisit indispensable documents like ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’ and ‘The Port Huron Statement.’