Professor Linda Voris has been a part of the American University Department of Literature for several years. Her classes are centered around one of her passions: poetry. She has taught classes at both the undergraduate and graduate levels focusing around this topic, as well as some classes focusing on British Literature. This semester, she has introduced a new section of the General Education class “Rethinking Literature” titled “Angelheaded Hipsters and Absurd”, which focuses on poets and authors from the Beats movement, as well as some other non-Beats movement poets. As the creator of the class, she is excited to take a subject she is passionate about and hopes that students will be inspired to read more literature too.
Her Campus American University: What does the title of the class, “Angelheaded Hipsters and Absurd: The Beats and the Cold War” mean?
Linda Voris: “Angelheaded hipsters” is a phrase that I am quoting from Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” and the “absurd” is my way of questioning whether these poets, including Ginsberg, were really so absurd, given the social context of the Cold War period. In a climate of homophobia, misogny, racism, anti-communism, and xenophobia, my question for the class is: who is calling whom absurd? Is the poetry and fiction of revolt so absurd given the climate?
HCAU: What kinds of texts and authors have you studied/will you be studying in the class?
LV: We began the course by reading extensively on the poetry of Allen Ginsberg. We started with “Howl,” and then spent some time with his other poem “Kaddish,” which is a long, painful attempt to mediate on the death of his mother, and on the nature of death itself. We are reading a sampling of other poets, not just Beat poets but also Frank O’Hara, who is a New York School poet, and Robert Creeley, Amiri Baraka, Gregory Corso, and Diane DiPrima. There aren’t many women writers associated with these literary movements, unfortunately.
HCAU: How did you design the course?
LV: I have been teaching these poets for years, and I have lately begun framing the literary texts by adding the historical and cultural contexts to my teaching. Two years ago, I taught an advanced course on post-war poetry in context because it seemed to be something I felt we really needed to address: how could we read “Howl” without an understanding of the restrictive social norms in place, and also the Cold War discourse? When I first taught the course I limited the reading to poetry along with literary criticism and cultural history. For this new General Education course, LIT 121, I added fiction and a wider sampling of poets. We’re reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, The Original Scroll, which is darker and more frank about sex than the first version published, and some sections from Naked Lunch by William Burroughs. The focus again is coming to terms with the literary texts within the cultural, social and political context.
We’re trying as a class not to treat the literary texts reductively, merely as historical registers of the period, but rather by understanding that literary texts respond to the cultural discourse of the time. For example, in his poem “America” Ginsberg uses a brilliant rhetorical strategy-sometimes speaking to America, as if to an equal, a lover or friend, and sometimes speaking for America. One can analyze this as an exaggeration of a conventional poetical device, using poetic address, but in a context in which cultural demands for conformity were made personal by reaching into a person’s bedroom and policing gender and sexual practices, one can also interpret Ginsberg’s strategy as a savvy response in kind to the cultural discourse. It is a personal address because the repressive and hegemonic discourse of the period was personal.
HCAU: Will you be using any other mediums for this class such as movies, TV shows, etc.?
LV: Yes, I think it’s important to give students a feel for the look of the time, the music and art, and we can do that effectively by watching film clips or documentaries. I’m showing a segment of Ken Burns’ Jazz, a documentary miniseries, so that we can learn to distinguish between jazz and bebop. With music in mind, we can evaluate whether music is a useful analog for some of the formal innovation of literary texts since writers including Ginsberg, Kerouac and Baraka stage the comparison. The images from the period are startling; the styles of clothing, the cars, the looks on the faces, remind us that these were actual lives lived.
HCAU: Are there any texts in particular that you are really looking forward to having students read?
LV: Well I’m very excited that we just finished reading Kerouac’s On the Road together. I think it led us to really intriguing questions about the ways in which Kerouac makes himself an outsider or foreigner as he travels back and forth and back and forth again from East Coast to West Coast and back again because in doing so he makes it possible to defamiliarize the image of America, and it gives him the means to ask, what is America? I feel so fortunate to have such bright and prepared students. Many of them have read Dante’s Inferno and Homer’s Odyssey, so they were ready to talk about the literary allusions Kerouac is making in his road trips to these mythic and allegorical journeys.
HCAU: Can you see yourself teaching this class in the coming semesters? Or, do you think other members of the literature department will want to teach it?
LV: I can see myself teaching it again. It’s been really enjoyable. I think what makes it enjoyable and successful is that the students chose the class based on the topic; they knew what the topic would be, and they came prepared and already interested in the topic. I think it works well as a introductory literature class for GenEd students here at AU, because it builds on students’ existing skills. Since so many students here are immersed in the analysis of social and political activity, they already have good analytical skills in evaluating critical essays concerning history and cultural history. I like this approach of introducing the skills of literary interpretation by building on something students already do well.
HCAU: What do you hope students gain from taking this class?
LV: I hope that they come away with an understanding of the kinds of questions we ask in literary interpretation, some practice of its analytical work, and improved expository writing skills. I hope they come away with curiousity about how these literary texts respond to the cultutal history of the moment. And I certainly hope that they come away with a burning desire to read more literature.
HCAU: Do you have any advice for a student who wants to take a section of Rethinking Literature but maybe isn’t sure which one is for them since all of them are so different?
LV: I think that when choosing among classes, students go to the bookstore when it’s time to register and they look around at what books are taught for a section and choose on the basis of what they would like to read. I think that’s a fne way to make a choice because students will need to immerse themselves in these literary texts during the semester. There are also, of course, short course descriptions published in the course catalog for students to get a sense of wht the various LIT 121 course offerings entail.
Does this sound like a literature class you would like to take for a GenEd? It sounds pretty cool to us!
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