English 182ca. Literature Under Capitalism

Instructor: Jesse McCarthy
Tuesday & Thursday, 10:30-11:45am | Location: TBD

Literature has been profoundly shaped by the advent of modern industrial capitalism. Since the Industrial Revolution, traditional social orders focused on local marketplaces have been supplanted by a global market society driven by an economy fueled by financial speculation. Perhaps not coincidentally, this same period witnessed the rise of the modern novel. The novel is therefore the perfect vehicle in which to examine ‘the way we live now,’ to borrow the famous title of Anthony Trollope’s novel inspired by the financial scandals of the 1870s. Can fiction help us to unveil the role of money in our lives? Its significance, how it shapes, corrupts, enhances, and deforms desire and ultimately how we understand the good life and what prevents or allows us to achieve it? Does art and literature suffer or flourish under a society dominated by bourgeois taste? How do we find meaning in a world of fluctuating values and transactional relations? How are age-old philosophical questions about freedom, love, labor, death, inequality, language, and art, reflected in our literature? In addition to reading classic texts by Adam Smith and Karl Marx about the nature and functioning of capitalism itself, we will read mainly novels and some non-fiction by authors such as Sally Rooney, Bret Easton Ellis, George Orwell, Daniel Defoe, Edith Wharton, Raven Leilani, Don DeLillo, Herman Melville, Martin Amis, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, Ed Park, and Jia Tolentino.