Work and Literature

Catalog description

If you get a job out of college, work eight hours a day, fifty weeks a year, and retire at age 65, at that point you have will spent roughly one third of your adult, waking life at work. And that is just paid work. Add in housework, childcare, and other forms of unpaid labor and the share of your waking hours devoted to work creeps closer to one half. And those calculations may actually underestimate the influence work has over your life. What you do will determine where you live, how you live, and, perhaps, whether you believe you have ultimately done something meaningful with your life. With work playing such an outsized role in a life, you may as well understand it as best you can. Hence this class. In it, we approach the question of work from the perspective of two disciplines: labor and employment relations and literature. The field of labor and employment relations asks about the social and economic forces-markets, compensation, globalization, immigration, etc.-that shape work. By contrast, the discipline of literature takes a more subjective approach to the question of work. Very broadly speaking, it shows how the forces that shape work play out in individual lives. In short, it shows how individuals feel about the work they do or, in the case of the unemployed, they do not do. Together, the two disciplines provide a global and personal perspective on one of the most important parts of our lives. Students registering for the course will read representative selections from both domains, engage in course discussions, take exams, and write essays as they explore the variety of ways both labor and employment relations and Literature can prepare them for their work lives and help them understand the place of work in culture and society.