English 609 Topic 52 - Constructing Class in Postwar American Literature
Winter 2010
Thursday 12:00 noon - 2:30 pm
Instructor: Dr. Michael Clarke Michael [dot] T [dot] Clarke [at] ucalgary [dot] ca
Course Description:
One of the reigning contemporary myths of the United States is that it is a classless society. A variation of the same idea is that the nation is a uniformly middle class society. This has not, however, always been a reigning myth of the nation, nor has it gone unchallenged in periods when it has been a dominant idea. There has been an active discourse on the nature of class in America, and literature has contributed significantly to developing this discourse.
Many scholars have acknowledged, however, that the nature of contemporary class formation defies many of the conventional theories about classes and class struggle. Marxist and kindred scholars are actively reinventing their methods of analysis in the light of contemporary socioeconomic change and evolving theories of class. At the same, many scholars are acknowledging that class analysis has lagged behind other contemporary forms of analysis (especially race, gender, and sexuality studies), particularly when it comes to U.S. literature. This is increasingly coming to seem like a problem at a time when socioeconomic divisions are becoming more and more pronounced in the country. One influential economist has recently called the turn of the 21st century a "new gilded age." It has also seemed like a problem at a time when many national policies are increasingly privileging class over other concerns; consider, for example, the substitution of socioeconomic background for racial preferences in many affirmative action programs. At this moment in time, class analysis in the U.S. poses special problems and special opportunities.
This course examines literary constructions of class in the United States since World War II. It will examine the development and historical changes in ideas about class during that time, the nature of class struggle in a nation that often denies it experiences such struggle, and contemporary theories about the history and nature of class formation.
Final readings have not yet been determined, but they will be selected from the following lists.
Primary Texts:
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
C. Wright Mills, White Collar
-----, The Power Elite
Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville
Sloan Wilson, Man in the Grey Flannel Suit
John Updike, Rabbit Run
Tillie Olsen, "I Stand Here Ironing"
Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities
David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross
Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory
Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
Gary Soto, selected poems
Sandra Cisneros, House on Mango Street
Bharati Mukherjee, Jasmine
Philip Levine, What Work Is
Michael Moore, Roger and Me
Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling
-----, Nickle and Dimed
Douglas Coupland, Microserfs
Richard Powers, Gain: A Novel
Secondary Texts:
Gavin Jones, American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature (Princeton 2008)
Eric Schocket, Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature (Michigan 2006)
Andrew Hoberek, Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work (Princeton 2005)
Bill Keller, Class Matters (Times Books 2005)
Amy Blair, "Producing Middle-Classlessness," American Quarterly (June 2002)
LaClau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Verso, 2nd edition, 2001)
bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters (Routledge 2000)
Rita Felski, "Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle Class" PMLA (Jan. 2000)
Daniel Walkowitz, Working with Class (North Carolina 1999)
Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the Postsocialist Condition (Routledge 1997)
Lowe and Lloyd, Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke 1997)
Pakulski and Waters, The Death of Class (Sage 1996)
Casarino Makdisi, Marxism beyond Marxism (Routledge 1996)
Fredric Jameson, "Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism" (Monthly Review, April 1996)
Martin Burke, The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (Chicago 1995)
Wai Chi Dimock, Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations (Columbia 1994)
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Verso 1991)
Resnick and Wolff, Knowledge and Class (Chicago 1989)
Peter Calvert, The Concept of Class (Hutchinson 1982)
Fredric Jameson, Political Unconscious (Cornell 1981)
Max Weber, "Class, Status, and Power"
Karl Marx, Capital
