The Sixties Revisited

Culture - Society - Politics. Edited by Jürgen Heideking, Jörg Helbig and Anke Ortlepp.

Even at the start of the new millennium the American Sixties continue to fascinate many scholars as one of the pivotal decades of the 20th Century. During those years the United States seemed to be strifing for new frontiers at home and abroad, driven by a generation of eager and idealistic young Americans: Civil Rights, Women's Liberation, Pop-Art, Flower Power, Postmodernism, Woodstock, the landing on the moon. Everything seemed possible. But the decade that had begun with the hopeful words of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. ended with the bloody nightmare of the Vietnam War, summers of violence in Northern black ghettos, and a rising tide of conservatism. To explore some of these contradictions, this collection of 25 essays takes a fresh look at American's most turbulent years from a multidisciplinary perspective. Dealing with the Arts and Media, Literature and Society as well as History and Politics, the contributions offer a broad approach to a contemporary understanding of the Sixties and their legacy. The book is divided into four parts: I. Prologue; Il. Arts and Media; III. Literature and Society; IV. History and Politics; V. Epilogue. -- Contents: William H. Chafe: The 1960s. The Critical Decade for Postwar America. - Marjorie Perloff: Watchman, Spy, and Dead Man. Johns, O'Hara, Cage, and the "Aesthetic of Indifference". - Bettina Friedl: Wearable Art. The Complication of Art through Fashion in the Sixties. - Paul Neubauer: Marshall McLuhan and the 60s New Media Debate. A Summary of Effects. - Michael Barchet: Before Irony. Seeing the Films of Robert Kramer. - Kai Weber: "Could be an Illusion, but I might as well try". Ideals and Practices of the Grateful Dead and the Woodstock Nation. - Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche: Suppose James Brown Read Fanon. Contrastive Sounds from the "Godfather of Soul". - Wilfried Raussert: John Cage. Limits and Possibilities of Crossing Cultural Boundaries. - Gerhard Hoffmann: The Sixties and the Advent of Postmodernism. - Christian S. Berkemeier: Short Fiction in the 1960s. Donald Barthelme and Postmodern Parody. - Dirk Padeken: The Content of the Form. Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" and its Discourse on Crime and Punishment. - Hans-Ulrich Mohr: The 'Reality' of War. Rabe's and Shepard's Vietnam Dramas. - Heike Raphael-Hernandez: The 'Non-Existent' Vietnam War in African Amerian Novels. A Question of Shared Guilt? - Jutta Ernst: "Slouching towards Bethlehem". Joan Didion's Cultural Narratives. - Antje Kley: A post-Stonewall Account of pre-Stonewall Life. Samuel Delany's "A Motion of Light in Water". - Georg Schiller: Writing about Transcendence and Writing as Transcendence. Native American Literature from the 1960s to the 1990s in Dialogue with Pragmatism. - Carsten Albers: Confessional Poetry Revisited. Sexton, Plath, Lowell, and Snodgrass from a 90s Perspective. - Nadja Gernalzick: Border Bending. Deconstruction and the Postmodern with Judith Butler and her Reception in Germany. - Sabine Bröck: The Urgency of the Petunias. Womanism as Cultural Intervention. - Paul D. Morris: Representing the Experience of War. Michael Herr's Dispatches and Literary Journalism. - Heike Schäfer: Wild Years. From the Environmental Literature of the Sixties to the Ecological Criticism of the Nineties. - Lisa McGirr: Conservative Politics in a Liberal Age. A History of the Right in the 1960s . - Gregory Field: Flushing Poisons from the Body Politic: The Fluoride Controversy and American Political Culture, 1955-1965. - Jonathan Soffer: A Republican Dilemma. The Race Politics of Robert A. Taft, Barry M. Goldwater and the Quest for a Conservative Majority. - Jürgen Donnerstag: When Your Parents Were Young. Teaching the American Sixties to German Students of the Nineties. IX,528 Seiten mit 29 Tafeln, gebunden (American Studies - A Monograph Series; Vol. 90/Universitätsverlag Winter 2001)