American Literature Research Seminar: Work Requirements: Literary Labour and Social Welfare
Throughout the history of the United States, work-based social welfare practices have served to affirm the moral value of work. In the late nineteenth century this representational project came to be mediated by the printed word with the emergence of industrial print technologies, the expansion of literacy, and the rise of professionalization. In ‘Work Requirements: Literary Labour and Social Welfare’, Todd Carmody asks how work, even the most debasing or unproductive labor, came to be seen as inherently meaningful during this era. He explores how the print culture of social welfare—produced by public administrators, by economic planners, by social scientists, and in literature and the arts—tasked people on the social and economic margins, specifically racial minorities, incarcerated people, and people with disabilities, with shoring up the fundamental dignity of work as such. He also outlines how disability itself became a tool of social discipline, defined by bureaucratized institutions as the inability to work. By interrogating the representational effort
Date: 7 June 2023, 17:00 (Wednesday, 7th week, Trinity 2023)
Venue: St John's College, St Giles OX1 3JP
Venue Details: New Seminar Room
Speaker: Dr Todd Carmody
Organising department: Faculty of English Language and Literature
Part of: American Literature Research Seminar
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editors: Katy Terry, Hope Lukonyomoi-Otunnu