| Lerninhalte |
In 1930, British politician FE Smith believed that working hours would become shorter in the future, leading to a working week of 16 to 24 hours by 2030. As a BBC article published in 2014 notes, "The cut in hours hasn't happened yet." While discussions of the reduction of the full-time working week to 35 hours were common in the late 1980s, this goal has since disappeared off the political agenda. Work, for most people, is the single activity that takes up the biggest proportion of their waking time. Culturally, it is also increasingly represented as the most legitimately important source of individual self-worth and societal value, and meritocracy, a concept that legitimises inequality by framing it as the natural consequence of differences in merit as manifested in work, is postulated as a social ideal. Nevertheless, work is virtually absent from British and American contemporary fiction—a symptom of the deeply contradictory function and value of work in contemporary societies. Only some kinds of work are represented frequently and positively, including, for instance, the work of the detective (in crime novels) and sometimes the scientist. This tension between a public discourse that hypes work in a purportedly increasingly 'creative' and 'knowledge-based' economy, yet at the same time apparently regards most types of work as too dull to read about, is going to be the central focus of this seminar. We will be exploring the structural effects that the absence of work has on contemporary mainstream fiction, as well as the characteristics of work that are represented positively in crime novels and other subgenres. We will be reading these fictions alongside other, non-fictional texts, such as newspaper articles, extracts from non-fiction books, government reports etc. In doing so, we will employ specifically literary concepts, such as realism, but also discuss broader, cultural concepts like meritocracy and the respective roles played by fiction and other discourses in constructing and naturalising social values.
The specific novels you should buy and read will be announced closer to the beginning of the semester, but be aware this course will have a substantial amount of reading assigned, including at least three novels. |
