Bill Solomon, Professor, English and 2019-20 Humanities Institute Faculty Fellow. Photographer: Douglas Levere

Join us for a virtual edition of our Faculty Fellows talks! This lecture series brings current UB humanities research out into the community.

Bill Solomon’s presentation is available to view online as a video, provided in two parts. Click through the links below to watch the videos in advance of Friday’s live Q&A session:

• Part 1: https://drive.google.com/open?id=13VRocXfWMWO35LWbvq4B2DDTZGOi_4Gy
• Part 2: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1JbzAexz3Se9GSOaT0WlsHJWPZlPhqq8v

On Friday, April 17 at 4:00 pm, we will gather for a live Q&A session with Bill on Zoom. Meeting info is as follows:

Topic: [Virtual]Scholars@Hallwalls: Bill Solomon – live Q&A
Time: Apr 17, 2020 04:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://buffalo.zoom.us/j/92767514444?pwd=RFp1SnR5TFd0L2tqc2tMak9XRE5rdz09

Meeting ID: 927 6751 4444
Password: 004766

As is customary for our Scholars@Hallwalls sessions, we encourage you to join us with a glass of wine/beer/cocktail and light fare to add to the convivial atmosphere.

Bill Solomon’s presentation addresses the role that acts of identification across racial and ethnic lines played in the construction of countercultural subjectivities in the US postwar era. In particular, the figure of the “white Negro” has long been recognized as a constitutive element of the beat generation’s rejection in the 1950s of the status quo. Similarly, dissenting youth in the 1960s coalesced into oppositional groups around the idealization of an array of exotic others. This talk examines the relation of the literary phenomenon known as black humor to such primitivist procedures and asks: to what extent did comic writers critique the mystifications structuring the countercultural imaginary?

Bill is Professor of English and the author of Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression and Slapstick Modernism: Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy Pop. He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Literature of the 1930s, and has published articles on film, literature and popular entertainment in numerous journals. His current book project is a study of the relationship of American literature in the 1960s to the contemporaneous rise of the counterculture in this country.