English - Free topic D: At Sixes and Sevens: The US and the UK in an Age of Flux

The “At Sixes and Sevens: The US and the UK in an Age of Flux” course is designed to help students put contemporary America and Britain into recent context. The themes covered introduce students to topics that MA courses within the department may develop further. The course is intended to help provide students with foundations and analytical tools for their self-directed theses in the tenth semester.

US Component:                                                                                   

“At Sixes and Sevens: The US in an Age of Flux” component uses thematic approaches in order to explore political, social, and cultural change in the US since 1945, with special focus on the 1960s and 1970s. American mindsets arguably clashed and transformed more during this period than in any other comparable timeframe. The aim of the course will be to examine, understand, and explain the factors and issues at play that encouraged upheaval. To come to grips with social and attitudinal change, topics covered will include the growth of consumer society and youth culture; the civil rights movement and the extension of rights to traditionally marginalized Americans; counterculture and permissive society; the environment; religion and reaction; changing social policy, and many others.

The program will use a combination of set texts, auxiliary readings, and electronic resources (TBA). Active and regular participation within a seminar setting is expected. Class discussions will be supplemented with materials posted at least weekly on Absalon. Participants will be asked to deliver a presentation on an agreed theme. The program course will conclude with a written paper at the end of the semester.

UK Component:

The medium of film offers us the past in its imaginative constructions, its assumed values, its varied landscapes; it allows us a rare chance for encounter with distant lives, with localities long since disappeared. By viewing British cinema as history, within its historical contexts, and within the analytic framework of ‘the new film history’ (James Chapman), we begin to examine its competing versions of social experience and everyday life. In this course we take a small sample of films, cycles and genres from the 1960s and 1970s and look at them in social, cultural and political context. We pay particular attention to the ways in which films connect with, respond to and rethink contemporary developments, and we consider the relation of British film to the wider social and political scene. Students are encouraged to focus their portfolio work around a small number of in depth case studies.