Working

The average person spends one third of her life working. But what is work? Why do we do it? Whose labor is valued, and whose is invisible? From nineteenth-century factories to the girl boss, this course looks at the cultural imagination of work in the United States. Possible texts: fiction by Lucia Berlin, Herman Melville, and Ottessa Moshfegh; films Showing Up and Working Girl; and nonfiction writing by Studs Terkel and Barbara Ehrenreich. Students will encounter related materials in visits to Stanford Special Collections and Cantor Arts Center. For their final assignment, students will conduct oral histories or produce original creative or critical work.