Proposing Faculty Member: Benjamin Balthaser
Short Description:
This course is designed to explore the representation, cultural reproduction, and meaning of class in the United States. While many Americans proudly claim their working class roots, cultural representations of people who work for a living are few and far between. This course will focus on artists, writers, and filmmakers for whom class, the workplace, and production of identity are the central foci of their art. Themes the course will explore what it means to construct a subjective identity through the lens class, how intersections of race, gender, and national origin contribute to concepts of a classed subject, as well as how literature, music, and film have been used to construct and contest the meaning of class in America.
This class will also provide you a forum to write creatively about you personal experiences with work, as children of working parents, as workers yourselves, and/or as consumers of goods produced by the labor of others. Opportunities to write about your will take the shape of first-person narratives, as well as formal creative writing assignments.