“In our country there is no sex.”
These words, uttered by a female bureaucrat from Leningrad during the first US-Soviet telebridge in 1987, struck a chord with viewers on either side of the ideological divide. The readings for this class tell a different story, peeling back the Iron Curtain to reveal the steamier scenes of the Cold War: both the passions of late-capitalism in the West, and the hot-cha in the dacha of the communist East. Keeping in mind the historical contexts in which these works by Russian, Czechoslovakian, and American authors were produced, this course aims to map out the manifold relationships between intimacy and ideology, sex and poetics, which took shape during the atomic age. In these readings, we will pay special mind to how certain bodies—sexual, textual, and political—acquired additional resonance as suspicious or perverse. Though we will search for the pleasure in the text, we will not lose sight of the pleasure of the text, as we consider how desire operates on multiple, intersecting planes: between characters; between readers and writers; and between the First and Second Worlds.
The abbreviated summer session aims for an intense reading experience, and will require of its participants rigorous exercises in writing. As our syllabus travels between geopolitical hot spots, we will likewise move among different generic spaces, from narrative prose of varying length to dramatic plays, critical essays, and film.
We will be using multiple digital media this summer, as befits the technophilic time period under our consideration. In addition to the class blog where we will post daily discussion questions; engage in web chats over material; and link to critical and interesting resources for writing, reading, and thinking about our syllabus and Cold War culture more broadly; the class will find primary documents, a maintained syllabus, and a gradebook on the Berkeley-only bspace page.
You can email any questions to the class instructor, Anastasia Kayiatos, at akayiatos@berkeley.edu .
The class email (not yet active) is coldwargetshots2@bspace.berkeley.edu
