01 CAC TTH6 12153 LOVE MU-210
Love and Work: Race, Sex, and Class in Early 20th c. American Literature
In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby describes Daisy Buchanan’s voice as “full of money”; Daisy herself describes her “white girlhood” growing up in Louisville, Kentucky. In this novel, as in so many others in American literature, desire, race, and class cannot be disentangled. In this class we will explore the knotted history of work and love, desire and money, in American life in a range of early 20th c. literature. We will consider the question of consumer culture and “conspicuous consumption"; desire across differences of race and class; the costs of upward mobility; wage labor and domestic labor; queer modernism; and the erotic dynamics of class and racial passing. Readings to include work by Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen, Thorstein Veblen, Nora Neale Hurston, Muriel Rukeyser, James Baldwin, and Patricia Highsmith.