LS 664 - Work and American Identity

(3.00 cr.)

Integrating academic scholarship, personal reflection, fiction, and popular culture, this course traces the transformation of work from unpleasant necessity to vocation or calling, and explores how we as Americans have come to mark our identities by our occupations. In tandem with this theme, participants explore the well-documented erosion of leisure, especially among professionals, and the peculiarly American expressions of alienation that accompany it.