Punks and Rebels: Violence as an Aesthetic of Resistance in Twentieth-Century England
- Spring 2016
Additional Details:
Is there such a thing as productive violence? Can violence be artistic? How does violence influence group identity? This course will look at violence in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly as it functions in British cultural movements—from mods to punk rock to fashion—to investigate these questions.
The course will begin with some short pieces of cultural and historical criticism to build a framework for reading violence in the course’s three novels: Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, and Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black. As a W-credit course, students will be expected to engage with these texts in class discussions, shorter writing assignments, and two major papers. Students will use these papers to perform their own close readings of the ways in which real world violence is taken up in art.