Updated Syllabus

First off, here's a link to join Professor Wilson's "Beat Attitudes" facebook site:

http://www.facebook.com/groups/265482983471155/



LTEL155B: Regions of the US (cont.)

SYLLABUS PART TWO:

Week Three: Ferlinghetti/ Ginsberg: City Lights, Franciscan Beatitudes, the SF Urban Contado

Mon. October 10: Readings and discussion of Ferlinghetti’s “San Francisco Poems”: Beatitude Quests inside the SF Contado (cont.)
1) Read all the poems and essays in San Francisco Poems
2) Read all the poems except Howl in Howl and Other Poems.
3) For larger social, political, and literary contexts, reading around in Beat Attitudes and Reclaiming San Francisco.

Wed. Oct. 12:
Readings:
1) Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems: Read all of Howl and look for other poems energized by or set in San Francisco and/or Berkeley, New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle.
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Week Four: Beatitude Quests for a Visionary "America”:
Culture, Ecopoetics, Hippies, and Beat/ Pos-Beat San Francisco

Mon. October 17: 1) Read all of Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America.
2) Bernie Lubell, Dean and Juliet MacCannell, “You Are Here (You Think): A San Francisco Bus Tour” in Reclaiming San Francisco (pp. 137-150).
3) Timothy W. Drescher, “Street Subversion: The Political Geography of Murals and Graffiti” in Reclaiming San Francisco (pp. 231-245).

Wed. October 19.

Read the first half of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums as well as passages from Beat Attitudes from Kerouac that help you to understand the “dharma bum” figure and Kerouac’s writing methods
Also listen to “October in the Railroad Earth” on YouTube sites and any other of Kerouac’s “SF” writings you are interested in like The Subterraneans or Big Sur.




Week Five: Dharma Bums and the Subterraneans: Mountains and Cities/ The Making of "Imperial San Francisco":

Mon. Oct. 24: 1) Finish Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums as well as read passages from Beat Attitudes from Kerouac more that help you to understand the “dharma bum” figure and Kerouac’s writing methods.

2) Also listen to “October in the Railroad Earth” on YouTube sites and any other of Kerouac’s “SF” writings like The Subterraneans, San Francisco Poems, or Big Sur.

3) Midterm preparation sheets handed out in class and discussed in sections.

Wed. Oct. 26: Gray Brechin, chapters one through three of Imperial San Francisco (read up to p. 170).
In-class viewing: Scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and SF as space of noir-"orientalism" and urban dread in Maltese Falcon directed by John Huston (1941).

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Week Six: Midterm Week/Mysteries of Wealth, Power, Labor, and Space.
Mon. Oct. 31: Finish Gray Brechin, chapters four through seven of Imperial San Francisco. We will particularly focus on chapter 5, ”The Hearsts: Racial Superiority and the Digestion of ‘All Mexico’”).

In-Class Viewing: Scenes from Citizen Kane (1941) and The Lady From Shanghai (1948) (Directed by Orson Welles).

We will go over review materials for midterm in class with instructor.

Wed. Nov. 2: Written Midterm will be held in class.