Class at the Intersections

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

In a 2006 article on intersectionality, historian David Roediger argued that the solution to the difficulty of studying “more than two things at once” was literature. Imaginative representations, he suggested, could enable us to trace how class worked with, and sometimes against, race, gender, sexuality, and other categories of difference, identity, and inequality. To do this, we must wrestle with two key problems related to the study of class. First, class is an especially complex, contested, and slippery concept, one that defies stable definition and that carries deeply conflicted meanings. Is class a matter of economic position, social relations, or cultural practices and expressions? How should we think about a category of identity that is widely seen as temporary and self-determined, especially in a country with relatively low levels of class mobility? Second, while the phrase “working-class” often brings to mind a straight white man who works in an industrial setting – a clearly outdated image -- in reality the working class has always included people of all races, ethnicities, gender and sexual identities. At the same time, the working class has long been divided along these lines of difference, a pattern that seems to have intensified, or at least become more visible, in the current political moment. Clearly, the intersectionality of class is a site of complication and conflict. Through analysis of literary and media representations by and about working-class people, we will consider how theoretical and contextual approaches can help us make sense of class and examine how class works with and against other categories of difference, identity, and inequality. Throughout, we will deploy interdisciplinary methods, incorporating ideas from sociology, history, anthropology, geography, and psychology into our discussions of literary and cultural texts. Most of our primary texts will reflect the U.S. context, across periods and genres, likely including works by Herman Melville, Tillie Olsen, Pietro DiDonato, Lynn Nottage, Lolita Hernandez, and others. Students will complete individual research projects focused on specific texts or questions, resulting in academic or public-oriented analyses. We will use both seminar and workshop approaches, with students leading class discussions, presenting their own work, and consulting with each other as their projects develop.