Severance and Contemporary Fiction

Focusing on the first season of Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller's 2022 dystopian television series, Severance, along with three recent novels-Vicenzo Latronico's Perfection, Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where are You?-this course will examine what happens when the idea of work as a social activity threatens to disappear from the ways in which we imagine our worlds. We will explore the political and social dimensions of work dramatized in these fictions in relation to analyses of labor by social theorists and economists, to ponder whether this disappearance (imagined or real) is a new phenomenon, and therefore something desirable, or merely an intensification of the processes of modernization, including mechanization, streamlining, outsourcing, etc. that have been going for two centuries or more within a world defined by capitalism. (Fiction, 20th/21st)