Dr. Thompson 3 credits

          This course will examine post-industrial, working class American literature (19th Century-21st Century) with particular attention to the construction of gender. While examining the difficulties in identifying and representing “the working class” and in considering various literary movements (Social Realist, Naturalist, Modernist) and various forms (fiction, drama, and non-fiction), we will explore working class figures as literary and social stereotypes, the rhetoric of class struggle, and the emergence of class identity politics. By focusing on gender, we will look to how women’s work is (de)valued and how interlocking systems of gender, race, and class oppressions impact women’s lives and the valuation of their labor. Texts include Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Silent Partner; Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills; Eliza Potter, A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Edith Wharton, Summer; Sophie Treadwell, Machinal; Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio; Ann Petry, The Street; Dorothy Allison, Trash; Caroline Chute, The Beans of Egypt Maine; Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed; and Cheri Register, Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoire.

          This course will fulfill the Genre/Theory, and Period requirements for the English major. A substitution form will be needed for the course to count for the Women's Studies or American Studies minors.

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