Week 1: Introduction: The Road Novel in the Long Twentieth Century
Giovanni Arrighi “Introduction” The Long Twentieth Century and this picture of his schema (1994)
Flannery O’Connor “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1953)

Suggested Secondary Reading:
Matthew Huber. “Oil, Life, Politics” Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (2013)
Karl Marx “Chapter 4: The General Formula for Capital” Capital (1867)
Patricia Yaeger "Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources" PMLA (2011)

Unit 1: Production

Week 2 (Please bring in an add, film clip, or other cultural artefact about 1950s road culture)
*Jack Kerouac, On the Road (Penguin, 1956)
Norman Bel Geddes. “Highways and Horizons” Magic Motorways (1940)
Wini Breines, “Introduction” Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up in the Fifties (1992)

Selected Secondary Reading:
Elaine Tyler May “Introduction” Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War (1998)
Penny von Eschen Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (2006)
Leerom Medovoi Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (2005)
Martinez, Manuel Luis Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Toma´s Rivera 2003.

Week 3
*Che Guevara Motorcycle Diaries (Perennial, 1957)
Arturo Escobar. "The Problematization of Poverty: The Tale of Three Worlds and Development" Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1994)
Harry Truman "Inaugural Address" January 20, 1949

Selected Secondary Reading:
W.W. Rostow The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960)
Ileana Rodríguez Women, Guerillas, and Love: Understanding War in Central America (1006)
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo “On the Road with Che Guevara and Jack Kerouac: Melancholia and Colonial Geographies of Race in the Americas” New Formations (2002)
Molly Geidel Peace Corps Fantasies: How Development Shaped the Global Sixties (2015)
Aimé Césaire Discourse of Colonialism (1950), p. 74-8

Unit Two: Circulation

Week 4
Stephen Spielberg Duel (1971) (film screening to be organised earlier in the week)
Midnight Notes Collective “Oil, Guns, and Money” (1999)

Selected Secondary Reading:
Deb Cowen “The Revolution in Logistics” The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (2014)
Fredric Jameson "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture" Social Text (1979)
Ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark The Road Movie Book (1997)

Week 5
*Samuel Delany Dhalgren (Gateway, 1975)
James and Grace Lee Boggs “The City is the Black Man’s Land” Pages From a Black Radical's Notebook (1966)

Selected Secondary Reading:
William Sites “Building an Urban Neoliberalism: The Long Rebirth of New York” Remaking New York: Primitive Globalization and the Politics of Urban Community (2003)
Peter Gallison “War Against the Center” Grey Room (2001)
Paul Gilroy: "Driving While Black." Car Cultures. By Daniel Miller. Oxford: Berg, 2001. 81-104.

Week 6: Reading Break

Week 7
*Samuel Delaney Dhalgren (Gateway, 1975)
Joshua Clover. “Introduction.” Riot Strike Riot (2016)

Selected Secondary Reading
Raymond Mohl “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities” Journal of Urban History (2004)
Eric Avila The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (2014)
Samuel Delany Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

Unit 3: Collapse

Week 8
*Cormac McCarthy The Road (Picador, 2006)
Imre Szeman “System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster” South Atlantic Quarterly (2007)

Selected Secondary Reading:
Jason Moore “Cheap Food and Bad Money: Food, Frontiers, and Financialization in the Rise and Demise of Neoliberalism” Review (2010)
Lee Edelman No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004)
Rebekah Sheldon The Child to Come: Life After Human Catastrophe (2016)

Week 9
*Jessmyn Ward Sing, Unburied Sing (Bloomsbury, 2017)
Sylvia Wynter “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” Savacou (1971)
Christina Sharpe “The Wake” In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)

Suggested Secondary Reading:
Ruth Wilson Gilmore Golden Gulags: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007)
Saidiya V. Hartman “The Time of Slavery” South Atlantic Quarterly (2002)

Week 10
*Yuri Herrera Signs Preceding the End of the World (& Other Stories, 2015)
Lisa Marie Cacho “Grafting Terror onto Illegality” Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (2012)