This course looks at the study of everyday life within the framework of capitalist development and anti-capitalist thought. We will consider how the experience of everyday life is impacted and also produced by and within state institutions and the market as well as in the racial and gendered norms of social discourse and culture more broadly. Key areas we'll address include waste/exhaustion, reproduction/production, language/speech, work/labor and unwaged work, decolonization and the racializing logic of modernity, feminism, war and postwar violence, environmental justice.
In the study of literature, ideas are developed through reading, interpretation, and dialogue about these readings and interpretation. Therefore, the course is organized as a seminar/workshop, with focus both on reading and writing skills. The texts that we read in this course are difficult, requiring careful, close reading. In the course, we will read both literary and critical texts and students will be invited to develop writing that is both creative and critical, as well. Because we will be developing skills for reading and interpreting these texts, our writing work will tend to be "readerly" - that is, writing that supports the process of reading: reading responses, close readings, focus arguments, and other exercises that help to develop the skills of literary analysis and interpretation.