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Rebels with a Cause
Course Units: 0.5
Rebels with a Cause
Steele Fall, 2008
The Reverend William Sloane Coffin, 1960’s civil rights and anti-war activist, defines a “robust nonconformist” as someone whose opinions have transformed into convictions. How does such a transformation occur? What enables a person to take an unpopular stand or to be willing to die for a cause? What can get in the way of acting on one’s beliefs? When is it acceptable to be, as per Holden Caulfield, “half yellow”? These are questions our protagonists wrestle with – a young American who fights in the Spanish Civil War (For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway), a psychopathic con man who tries to rally fellow mental patients to change hospital policy (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey), a jazz musician who struggles for his dignity on the drug-infested streets of Harlem (“Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin), lovers in modern India who attempt to defy the laws of the age-old caste system (The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy), a disillusioned husband and wife who travel the deserts of North Africa just after WWII in search of something to believe in and commit to (The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles).
