PROFESSOR STEPHANIE A. SMITH

SPRING 2001/WEDS. PERIODS  5-7 (11:45-2:45)
OFFICE: 4321 TUR
PHONE: X253
EMAIL: SSMITH@ENGLISH.UFL.EDU
OFFICE HOURS: 9-11 A.M. FRIDAYS AND BY APPOINTMENT

Although many Americans will spend most of their adult lives working, fictional representations of work--the conditions of employment, the kinds of labor Americans perform, which jobs are available to whom, what those jobs entail--are relatively rare. Or so it might seem. And yet, many novels written in the United States during the 19th century were, in fact, representations of, and investigations into, the conditions of labor. This course will be dedicated to rendering the multiple manifestations of "labor"--broadly conceived--visible in the 19th century American novel (mostly).

Engaging a variety of critical perspectives, the course will both explore and raise questions about the rapidly changing nature of work, the public sphere, politics and the economy, with a specific focus on ante-bellum conflicts that erupted into the Civil War, the post-bellum years of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age.

Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick
Stephen Crane, Maggie, Girl of the Streets (1893-96)
James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (1823)
Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills (1861)
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Henry James, The American (1877)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Leo Marx, Machine in the Garden
Herman Melville, Moby Dick & Great Short Works of Herman Melville (1852)
Frank Norris, McTeague (1899)
Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism :Classical Political Economy and the  Secret History of
Primitive Accumulation
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age (1873)
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Selected Reading List: Recommended
The following titles are recommended, for those who wish to read beyond the historical or theoretical scope of the course.

Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall and Linda Gordon, America's Working Women : A Documentary History
1600 to the Present
Maria Cummins, The Lamplighter
Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man
Friedrich Engels, The Origins of Private Property, Family and the State
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Love of the Last Tycoon
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economicsand Human Work
Emma Goldman, "The Traffic in Women "
Jacqueline Jones, American Work: Four Centuries of  Black and White Labor
Paul Le Blanc, A Short History of the U.S. Working Class : From Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century
Theresa Malkiel, Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Das Kapital
Paula Rabinowitz, Labor & Desire : Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America
Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women"
George Schuyler, Black No More
Mark Seltzer,  Bodies and Machines
Ruth Sidel, Women and Children Last: The Plight of Poor Women in Affluent America
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City
John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle
Landon R. Y. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism : The National Consumers' League, Women's
Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era

Brief Definition of "American Realism"
Labor.org
Labornet
Laborwatch
Labor Studies at Indiana