ENG 5049 Fall 2021 Goodman

This course looks to works in literature and theory to explore one of the basic challenges to democracy in our time: precarity. Today’s dominant hegemonic order sets itself as, for the most part, unanswerable to the majority, unrelatable, and inaccessible. Experiences of dispossession and detachment inform our sense of agency and citizenship as political and economic power is increasingly wrested away from representing the worker and the citizen. Though precarity certainly inherits legacies of colonialism and imperialism, this new phase of democratic retrenchment involves new constructions of racial and gender identity and inequality. Marginalization and disengagement have produced, on the psychological front, alienation and paranoia; on the political front, statelessness, militarism, terror, and the demise of the institutions through which citizens in a democracy have traditionally made demands and voiced grievances; on the economic front, financial and employment insecurity, gig work, worker obsolescence, and austerity, in addition to sickness and contamination, environmental collapse, and the increasing sense that we are always one step behind the technologies of our generation. In this course, we will consider the causes and effects of precarity as a dominant modern life-form by reading authors possibly including but not limited to: Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Daniel Schreber, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Georgio Agamben, Zygmunt Bauman, Wendy Brown, Grégoire Chamayou, Judith Butler, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Robin Kelley, Saidiya Hartman, Yoko Ogawa, Clarice Lispector, Ling Ma, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Jhumpa Lahiri.