The Art of Doing Nothing: Idlers, Drifters, Slackers,and Fugitives in Literature and Film

Catalog description

What would it take to stop working? To refuse work? Give it up? To do something else besides productive activity and labor, or nothing at all? And how might doing nothing introduce radically different senses of freedom than what we are used to? In this seminar, we will think about some of the ways that modern literature and film reflect on the art of doing nothing, turning the city or its outskirts into a locus for personal and collective struggle, resistance, and transformation. Our aim will be to examine strategies for breaking free from the dominance of work, as illustrated by figures like the slacker, idler, fugitive, drifter, ambler, and so-called flâneur/flâneuse, primarily but not exclusively within the urban topographies of Paris, New York, and London from the nineteenth century onwards. We will pay special attention to the critical potentialities of unmanaged and wayward lives at the intersection of race, class, and gender. We will read stories by Beckett, Breton, Calle, Chamoiseau, Cole, Melville, Rhys, Rousseau, and Woolf; poetry by Baudelaire, Boyer, Hughes, and Poe; and theoretical work by Benjamin, Federici, Hartman, and Wilde. We also view films by Varda and Chalfant.