ENGL 3050 - Commercial Life in American Culture

This course will examine the ways Americans have conceived of commercial life. Americans have tended to regard with some ambivalence the effect of commerce on social life, which commerce seems both to stimulate and to splinter. We will examine the range of responses to commercial life in fiction , films, essays, economic treatises, business histories, and memoirs, with some special attention to conceptions of the workplace and to the recent crisis and its aftermath.