Business and Literature

Catalog description

An investigation into how writers and the cultures in which they write have represented business and those engaged in it. For many people, literature and business could not have less to do with each other. According to this view, literature escapes from reality to the imaginative, while nothing could be more focused on the real than business and its buying and selling of commodities and services. The problem is that no one told literary writers of this mutual incompatibility. For centuries, writers have peered into the world of business and brought back stories intended to document, inspire, and warn. True, writers have often, and sometimes unthinkingly, condemned business and those who follow it, but they have just as often had genuine insights into its workings. In this course, we will follow the relationship between literature and business over the course of modern history. Although one version of the course would begin with literature that dates back to the invention of capitalism in (more or less) the sixteenth century, our course will begin at the turn of the nineteenth century with the Industrial Revolution in England and the United States and follow the literature of business up to the present. Our aim in reading is not just to understand how writers have represented business and those who pursue it, which, it has to be admitted, has often been with contempt. But, rather, in reading more sympathetic works, to understand the drama of business, why those who pursue it find it so invigorating. Money, of course, is one answer to that question, but it is neither the only nor the most important one. Texts may vary, but they are almost certain to include Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son (1847); Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853); the "Economy" chapter of Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854); Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1875); Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (1899); George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara (1905); Theodore Dreiser's The Financier (1912); Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (1922); Edwin Lefevre's Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1922); James M. Cain's hardboiled masterpiece Mildred Pierce (1941); F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941); Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949); Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955); Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1957); Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion (1962); Joseph Heller's Something Happened (1974); William Gaddis's J R (1975); David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (1984); Michael Lewis's Liars Poker (1987); and Richard Powers' Gain (1998).