1. Nonconformists prepare the terrain
The 1950s

2. An Atomic Age

3. The Cold War and Red Scares

4. Affluence and Suburbia

5. Family

6. An American Century American military and economic power
‘Americanisation’ fear from earlier in century. Shared by conservatives and left
Antiamericanism in Europe
Culture: film, music, literature and television
Global cultures and the local (McKay)

7. The teenager

8. Elvis and Rock and Roll

9. http://www. dailymotion
-presley-hound-dog_music#.UW0Xo44hQWY

10. An existential age? Intellectual disillusion
Atomic age and cold war, mass society and holocaust. Jewish writing (US Bellow, Roth, Malamud etc)
Disruption of Europe
John Paul Sartre ‘Nausea’ (1938) and existentialism.

11. Albert Camus
‘The modern mind is in complete disarray’ (notebook, early 1940s)
‘L’etranger (The Outsider/The Stranger) (1942)
‘The Plague’ (1947)

12. Francois Sagan Bonjour Tristesse (1954) Written when Sagan was 18
‘amoral’?
Some critics praised
350,000 copies sold in the first two years
‘It was unacceptable, too, that a young girl should have the right to use her body as she will, and derive pleasure from it without incurring a penalty.” (Sagan answering critics 30 years later)

13. Existentialism and culture
Sinatra ‘In the Wee Small hours’ (1955)
‘Only the Lonely’ (1958)
Sloan Wilson ‘The man in the grey flannel suit’ (1955)
‘High Noon’ (1952)
Fellini and ‘La Dolce Vita’ (1960)
Antonioni ‘L’Avventura (1960) 1st of trilogy

14. The Blue Moment Jazz as modernity, global, improvised
Miles Davis and ‘The Birth of the Cool’
Davis to Paris in 1949 (first trip abroad)
Affair with Juliette Greco
The Parisian Imaginary
Return to drug addiction
‘Kind of Blue’ (1959)

15. Abstract Expressionism Rothko ‘untitled’ (1959)

16. Jackson Pollock Blue Poles (1952)

17. The Beat Generation ‘Spontaneous bop prosody’
Jazz and the beats (Charlie Parker)
Buddhism, alcohol and the old America? (Different views)
Ginsberg, ‘Howl’ (1956)
Kerouac, ‘On the Road’ (1957)
Burroughs, ‘Naked Lunch’ (Olympia Press, Paris, in US)
The Beat subculture emerges in University towns and cities. Goatees, berets, cool and bohemia. ‘Hipsters’
Norman Mailer, ‘The White Negro’ (1957)

18. Politics McCarthyism silences the left Anticommunism in Europe
Antiamericanism in Europe
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Fd after J.B. Priestley article ‘Britain and the bomb’ in the New Statesman (2 Nov 1957)
Aldermaston march, April
Civil Rights struggle in the United States.

19. Conclusion
‘The outsider is not sure who he is. He has found an “I”, but it is not a true “I”. His main business is to find his way back to himself.’ (Colin Wilson, ‘The Outsider’)
Brando in ‘The Wild One’ (1956) when asked what he is rebelling against, answers ‘What have you got?’
Teenagers, artists, writers and musicians reflect the crisis of modernity. This is politicised in the 1960s.