LS 710 - Fiction and Film of the 1980s

(3.00 cr.)

Students examine how today's contentious society took shape in the 1980s; how, for example, conservatism in politics and religion gathered steam in the late seventies and eighties, even as "postmodernism" (in its many guises) triumphed in the academy and the arts. The course undertakes a study of the two trends which defined American culture in the 1980s, with effects that still linger today. The first was the assimilation, into the mass media and elsewhere, of values and attitudes associated with the counterculture of the sixties and seventies. The second was the rise, also widely celebrated in the commercial culture, of money-making as a preeminent social goal.