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:
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:
*Patricia Highsmith The Price of Salt (1952)
Elaine Tyler May“Introduction”Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War(1998)

Selected Secondary Reading

Week 4:
*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)

Unit Two: Circulation

Week 5
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)
Timothy Mitchell Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2011)

Week 6: Reading Break - No Class

Week 7
*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)
Joshua Clover. “Introduction.” Riot Strike Riot (2016)
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)

Week 8
*Samuel Delaney Dhalgren (Gateway, 1975)
Sara Ensor "Samuel R. Delany and the Ecology of Cruising" (2017)

Selected Secondary Reading
Samuel Delany Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)
Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962)

Unit 3: Collapse

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

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)
Phil Neel Hinterland: America's New Landscape of Class and Conflict (2017)

Week 10
*Yuri Herrera Signs Preceding the End of the World (& Other Stories, 2015)
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo "The Afterlives of Indio Bárbaro" in Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (2015)

Suggested Secondary Reading

Lisa Marie Cacho “Grafting Terror onto Illegality” Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (2012)