Comparative Literature 348 - Labor & Working-Class Fiction

Most people work, and the meanings of their paid and unpaid work?as well as the social place of working people?have been extensively imagined and narrated in fiction and poetry. This course explores literature by, for, and about workers around the world?dating from early capitalism to the present, comparing workers? experience internationally, and ranging from the heroic age of proletarian literature to today?s critical, often pessimistic writing on class, the workplace, and postindustrial society. We will pay special attention to genres in which working-class themes and writers have been prominent (such as vernacular songs and poetry, the strike novel, and autobiographical writing), and will ask how the class experience is inflected through the lens of gender, nationality, race, and other markers of social difference. (Gen. Ed. AT, DG)