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.com/video/x1mvfc_elvis -presley-hound-dog_music#.UW0Xo44hQWY http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1mvfc_elvis -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. 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) 1 st of trilogy

13. 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)

14. Abstract Expressionism Rothko ‘untitled’ (1959)

15. Jackson Pollock Blue Poles (1952)

16. 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, 1959. 1962 in US)  The Beat subculture emerges in University towns and cities. Goatees, berets, cool and bohemia. ‘Hipsters’  Norman Mailer, ‘The White Negro’ (1957)

17. Politics  McCarthyism silences the left  Anticommunism in Europe  Antiamericanism in Europe  Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Fd. 1958 after J.B. Priestley article ‘Britain and the bomb’ in the New Statesman (2 Nov 1957)  Aldermaston march, April 1958-1963  Civil Rights struggle in the United States.

18. 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.