Department of English

This is a class about what we do – as writers, critics, and readers of literature.  We’ll be reading fictions and essays from the long eighteenth century that represent a range of activities that count as work:  nursing, threshing, sewing, legislating, writing, sermonizing.  But we’ll also be thinking about how the occupations associated with books and with criticism arose from that recent past. What does it mean to read and write in a period in which work is becoming a new form of value, a way of life, a means of social elevation as well as identity?  How do writers emerge from the parade of other tradespeople, servants, and merchants on display in the fiction of the time?  How does the public sphere mitigate the relation of capital to labor?  Our theoretical ground involves old and new arguments attentive to what Arendt calls ‘the human condition’ as one defined in part by our relation to work, labor, and leisure. As a framing of these historical questions, we’ll be keeping our eye on recent debates about how criticism and writing become thinkable as lines of work -- and asking whether this is indeed the best category in which to place them as we consider their precarious future as activities.  Readings include Moll Flanders, Mansfield Park, Millennium Hall, essays by Defoe, Godwin, Johnson, and letters and diaries by Wollstonecraft and Boswell.  Secondary literature includes readings from Carolyn Steedman, Jacques Rancière, Silvia Federici, John Guillory, Nancy Fraser, and Raymond Williams, Habermas, and Axel Honneth.