Rogues and Scoundrels

Catalog description

Through readings of novels, films, television series, and essays from the late-nineteenth century to the present, this course explores how British culture has portrayed the figures of the rogue and the scoundrel. Karl Marx and Friedrich will be recruited from the start, for in their writings a distinctly scoundrelly personage emerges: the lumpenproletarian. The lumpenproletariat is one of the most infamous terms in Marxist thought. It stems from the German word lump, which denotes scab, rag, canker, sore, and scoundrel, and connotes a series of undesirables the unemployed, the sex worker, the homeless, the addict, the petty criminal, the single mother, and the queer cruiser.