123044 PS PS Literary Studies (2023W)

Class, as historian E.P. Thompson teaches us, is not "a thing" but rather “a relationship” (1963: 11). To think of the "working class", then, is to recognize those who exist within a set of social relations - relations to power, history, production, and labor - rather than to identify a specific, unchanging, transhistorical object. Working-class literature developed as a genre in the late 19th and the early 20th Century, alongside the formation of a self-conscious, militant labor movement in the English-speaking world. Within this tradition, we see thematic concerns with alienation, dispossession, solidarity, poverty, toil, and struggle; we also notice formal features of vernacular language and abrasive imagery.

This semester we will examine 20th and 21st Century working-class literatures from India, Ireland, the U.K., and the United States, and we will see how working-class existence is represented in Anglophone prose and poetry. From here, we will examine the historical and theoretical questions that arise from class representation, especially as labor conditions are tied to race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. Finally, our perspective will take us into bigger questions that consider class as the force through which we all confront the contradictions of capital and social power.

Course outcomes:
• Students will be able to recognize common thematic and narrative features associated with working-class literatures.
• Students will be able to properly analyze class as a set of social relations and its connection to history.
• Students will be able to recognize concepts and methods useful for the study of literature more broadly.