The course offers an introduction to economic criticism. We will read works from different centuries, beginning with Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. We will also include a Victorian work that focuses on industrialization (e.g. Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South) and a more contemporary text and film that deal with the recent financial crisis. The course seeks to develop a sense of how literature represents and relates to economic problems and its own material conditions and how it responds to economic crises. We will discuss ideas as well as formal innovations to trace diverse ways in which literature and economics interact.
If you would like to prepare for this course, please being by reading Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. We will use the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice, ed. by J. Drakakis, Shakespeare Arden, 2011.
|