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SoSe 21: The Other Half: Literatures of American Poverty

James Dorson

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As millions of people have been thrown into poverty during the Covid-19 pandemic, sensational news coverage of overrun food banks and partisan disputes over the size of “relief packages” have once again rendered poverty visible in public discourse. While poverty in the US has periodically been discovered and rediscovered since at least the middle of the 19th century, Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky observe that “the problem lies not in poor people’s invisibility but in the terms on which they are permitted to be visible in public discourse” (2001; 2). Taking up the question of how the poverty of what Jacob Riis famously called “the other half” is rendered visible, this class examines the affordances of different literary genres for mediating discourses on poverty in the US. Looking at genres such as sentimentalism, social realism, documentary photography, life writing, and drama, questions that we will address include: How and for whom is poverty made visible in literature? How are different forms of hunger (material, social, spiritual, artistic, etc.) related and ranked? How are processes of impoverishment depicted and what representational strategies are used to either depoliticize or repoliticize poverty? How is the agency of the poor disregarded or asserted? How does literature negotiate or perpetuate pitfalls of poverty discourse such as the “culturalization” or “scientization” of poverty? And how do changing genres and discourses of poverty represent the thorny relationship between race and class? The primary literature we will be reading spans the period from the middle of the 19th century to the present. Most of the material for the class will be uploaded to Blackboard. Only the following two texts will not be made available and should be acquired: Suzan-Lori Parks’s play “In the Blood” from The Red Letter Plays (2001) and Madeline Ffitch’s novel Stay and Fight (2019). close