Senior Perspective Course
SRP 435
(also crosslisted as ENG 435 and PHL 435)
LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND ECONOMICS: CRITICAL
REPRESENTATIONS OF COMMERCIAL LIFE
Core (A) Curriculum Requirement
GENERAL INFORMATION
Professors:
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Drawing on contemporary work in critical theory, literary
criticism, aesthetics, and rhetoric, this course examines the
relations of philosophy, economics, and literature through an
assessment of the representation of economic phenomena in
selected literary and philosophical texts. The course will
explore 1) how an analysis of such texts can reveal underlying
social forms such as private property, the commodity, wage labor,
and capital; and 2) how these ethically consequential forms tie
in with problems of poverty, unequal distributions of income and
wealth, overconsumption and depletion of natural resources,
competition and conflict, and social instability.
TEXTS
(actual textbooks may vary from semester to semester and depending on the instructor)
- Patrick Murray, ed., Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology
of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present (Routledge, 1997)
- Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Norton Critical Edition,
1990)
- Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (Viking Critical
Edition, 1996)
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (Viking Critical
Edition, 1997)
- Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Robert M. Adams, Norton Critical Edition
(W. W. Norton, 1992)
OTHER
TYPICAL DISCUSSION TOPICS
(actual topics may vary from semester to semester and depending
on the instructor)
(click on the links below for study questions)
- Genesis 1-3
- Tantalus
- Midas
- Plato's Republic, Book I
- Aristotle's Politics, Book I
- St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa
Contra Gentiles, Chapters XXX (wealth) and CXXXIII
(poverty) and Summa Theologiae, Questions
66 (theft and robbery), 77 (cheating, buying and selling), 78 (usury), and 100 (simony)
- Dante's Inferno Cantos XVII (usury) and XIX
(simony)
- Ezra Pound's Canto XLV (Usura)
- Friedrich Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education
of Man (Sixth Letter)
- Charles Dickens, Hard Times
- John Locke's Second Treatise of Government
("Of Property")
- David Hume's Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary
("Of Commerce" and "Of Refinement in
the Arts")
- Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, I: 1-2,
V: 1
- John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy
("Of the Grounds and Limits of Laisser-Faire
or Non-Interference Principle")
- Karl Marx's Capital I:1-2, 4, II:4, 6
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
- Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure
Class ("Pecuniary Emulation"
and "Conspicuous Consumption")
- Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism ("The Spirit of Capitalism")
- Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
- Simone Weil's Oppression and Liberty ("Sketch
of Contemporary Social Life")
- Jean Baudrillard's Selected Writings
("Consumer Society")
- Georges Bataille's The Accursed Share
("Theory of 'Potlatch'")
- John Updike, "A&P"
- Kurt Vonnegut, "Harrison Bergeron"
- Ralph Ellison, "King of the Bingo Game"
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Balthazar's
Marvelous Afternoon"
| Home
|