Our work this quarter will be centered on a topic that has been particularly germane in recent months: the market. We will begin with a survey of “market” as a keyword. Using Raymond Williams, Karl Marx, and Meredith McGill to set up the parameters of our study, we will likely take up the following questions: What do we mean when we refer to “the market”? Where do we look for markets as sites of exchange? What narratives can be told through investigating market cultures? As the capitalist market is underwritten by an assumption of equal exchange, how do we account for the uneven distribution of power and wealth? And, lastly, how has our capitalist economy (in Meredith McGill’s words) “turned social relations to market ends”? We’ll ground these rather abstract questions through three texts that reflect particular markets: the labor market in “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853) by Herman Melville; the slave market in “The Bear” by William Faulkner (1942); and the biomedical market in The Constant Gardener (2005).
As a Computer-Integrated Course (CIC), we’ll meet one day per week in a computer lab and the other day in a seminar classroom. There will be a marked difference between the two days: on Tuesdays, we will have a more traditional, circle-based seminar and discussion; and on Thursdays, we’ll use computers to aid our writing, peer review, and research. We will run a nearly paperless classroom: you will turn in your essays electronically; I will leave electronic comments, and your final portfolios will be submitted online. We will spend the first few weeks getting used to the technology, but in the meanwhile, please refer to the CIC Student Guide for help.
