Week 9

Today we will review the film Howl, in which James Franco portrays the poet Allen Ginsberg, whose life and work illustrates the tensions of mid-century America, between the haves and have not, between conservative elites and the disaffected, educated and uneducated alike, searching for more transparency and candidness in national life, more tolerance and compassion, amid an increasingly corporatized and militarized order that proved an obstacle to simple human happiness.  Ginsberg, like Walt Whitman, and like the black writers named below, wrote for common people or for everybody and was without social pretension.

We will also look, time permitting, at several short narratives over this week and next written partly in the vernacular of African American people, including one by Zora Neale Hurston called "The Gilded Six-Bits." and another by Langston Hughes called "Red-Haired Baby." Both writers are representative of the Harlem Renaissance, an early 20th century period when a great many black artists rose to prominence and distinguished Harlem for its artistic culture.

Of the critics who complained he showed black people in a deplorable light (however realistic) and wanted instead portraits that would show black people in the best possible light, as they strove for greater social integration and justice, Langston Hughes would write: "I sympathized deeply with those critics and those intellectuals, and I saw clearly the need for some of the kinds of books they wanted. But I did not see how they could expect every Negro author to write such books. Certainly, I personally knew very few people anywhere who were wholly beautiful and wholly good. Besides I felt that the masses of our people had as much in their lives to put into books as did those more fortunate ones who had been born with some means and the ability to work up to a master's degree at a Northern college. Anyway, I didn't know the upper class Negroes well enough to write much about them. I knew only the people I had grown up with, and they weren't people whose shoes were always shined, who had been to Harvard, or who had heard of Bach. But they seemed to me good people, too."