Text Box: Best Sellers Professor David Willbern MWF 10:00 - 10:50 Reg. No. 052773 Text Box: 374 Text Box: Suppose our culture had a dream-life, revealed through its advertising, television shows, supermarket tabloids, Web sites, and best-selling novels. In this course we will become armchair anthropologists of our own society, examining popular late 20th-century literary works and their treatment of core social issues: gender roles, family relations, cultural stereotypes (like racism and sexism), economic ambition, sexual violence, war, law, religion, superstition, and science. The concept of cultural fantasy is problematic, of course. Contemporary America consists of a variety of subcultures, co-operating, competing, and compromising within shifting valences of political and economic power. Any notion today of a single primary American culture is a nostalgic device, whose functions are defensive, anxious, and conservative. One function of bestsellers may be to support this traditional nostalgia while exhibiting major threats to it. In other words, these books allow us to exercise our anxieties and satisfy our desires without risk. This course will survey popular literature and popular culture in the United States from just after World War II to the present. We will read the following books: J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye; Grace Metalious, Peyton Place; Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird; Judith Rossner, Looking for Mr. Goodbar; Peter Benchley, Jaws; Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Stephen King, Misery; plus a contemporary novel, possibly chosen by the class. There are necessary elements of social history in this course. To be best understood and appreciated, each book should be situated in its cultural context, aligned with major features of American life at the moment of publication and popularity. To that end, I will provide brief historical lectures to frame each novel. Outlines of these lectures, along with course requirements, paper topics, Web sites for each novel, study questions, and useful links, are available on the course Web site at http://icarus.ubetc.buffalo.edu/willbern/bestsellers/index.htm This course satisfies a later literature requirement.