32204

SoSe 13: Literary Occupations: Work, Unemployment and Slackerdom

Sophia Frese

Comments

This seminar deals with literary representations of work and its counterparts in American literature of the late 20th and up to the present. To frame these literary explorations into wage labor, unemployment and slackerdom, or even the purposeful rejection of work, we will read theoretical and philosophical texts that have shaped our understanding of work and its absence. The disciplines of political science and economics approach waged work and its increasing scarcity in the United States brought upon both by the automation of labor processes and the outsourcing of jobs by describingand analyzingthese issues, or turning to them with the purpose of solving them through a programmatic answer of one kind or another. Literature, however, explores the daily toil of the American-born and immigrant workingmen and women without aiming necessarilyto offer a political or economic solution. The texts that we will read in this seminar are written by and about workers both employed and not, and of blue- and white-collar backgrounds. Together with the literature of writers who struggle to fashion a self outside of the ideology of work, the primary material of this seminar provides us with an imaginary map of contemporary America en route to a post-work society. We will read short stories from George Saunders' collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) and Pastoralia(2000), Lolita Hernandez'sAutopsy of an Engine and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant (2004), Joshua Ferris's novel Then We Came to the End (2007), essays by Fran Lebowitz,DinawMengestu'sThe Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2008), Mona Simpson's My Hollywood (2010), and Nothing Doing by Willie Smith (2012). close