WORK AND LEISURE

For most people in modern societies, work not only takes up many of their waking hours, but also makes up a significant part of their identity. Even beyond individual employment, more abstract concepts such as work ethic and productivity, but also mindfulness and self-optimisation, shape our everyday lives in countless ways. In this lecture series, we want to explore how work and its counterpart, leisure or “free” time, are depicted and discussed in literary texts, and what this might tell us about the social contexts they were written in as well as larger trajectories.

To approach this overarching question, we will discuss a variety of texts and authors from British and American literature. Is work always work? Which jobs are written about, and how? Can we trace the effects of pragmatic and cultural shifts surrounding labour in literature? We will also examine the values associated with work, and with doing nothing, as well as notions of making use of leisure time in literary as well as theoretical texts. From another angle, we will take a look at writing itself and literary production as a profession.

As always, this will be a joint venture featuring different members of the English Department in individual sessions. This means that you will benefit not only from expertise in different subsections of literary history, but also from different voices and points of view every week.

Unlike in recent semesters, this lecture will for the most part take place in person, on Mondays from 6:15-7:45 p.m., in lecture hall 14 (Neue Uni). Three of the talks are going to take place asynchronously online -- please refer to the schedule below for details. If you wish to obtain credit points for this lecture, you will be asked to submit a response paper. Administrative details will be explained in due course.