Title: SEMINAR: 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE (3)

PRQ:

Many contemporary approaches to literary history and criticism speak of their attention to questions of gender, race, class, and sexuality.  Much as these approaches claim multi-faceted attention to these matrices of identity-formation (and hence to the psychological and sociological work that literature does), one of these matrices is consistently dealt with as an afterthought, a “complication” of social identity, but rarely as the central category: class.  Yet insofar as the other factors typically are analyzed in relation to social privilege and marginalization, enrichment and impoverishment, class difference might be the category of social difference that underpins all the others. Certainly, literature by working-class people is hardly represented in the canon at all.

This seminar will address both the conceptual and canonical questions associated with working-class literature in the United States.  The canon questions will be dealt with by wide reading, centered on the Oxford American Working-Class Literature anthology (2005), but extending to canonical works such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) and Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark (1915) as well as to noncanonical works like Alexander Saxton’s The Great Midland (1947), work songs, and the poetry of American labor unions.  The course will also explore the work of pioneering critics and theorists of class such as Terry Eagleton, Alexander Saxton, Laura Hapke, David Roediger, Paula Rabinowitz, and Eric Lott.  The course will also include some theoretical and practical reflection on the conditions of the academic marketplace, with recent work by Marc Bousquet as the key resource.

Class attendance and active participation in discussion; one class presentation; short essay; a research prospectus and research paper.

Nicholas Coles and Janet Zandy, eds., American Working-Class Literature

John Marsh, ed., You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark                

Alexander Saxton, The Great Midland

Judy Grahn, The Common Women Poems

Martin Espada, The Republic of Poetry

Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation