| Writing assignment #1, 5 pages, due at the beginning of class on Thursday, February 22 | |
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Our second writing assignment will interrogate “common knowledge” of “capitalism.” Our source base will be the searchable library catalog of your hometown, or of a nearby town. Most local library catalogs are searchable; some require a library card. If the latter is the case, then you can find an open catalog for a nearby town. Please search the library catalog for books about “capitalism” and “the economy” until you have a strong sense of what is available to the reading public in your hometown or nearby town. You should be able to tell a lot about each book from its title, and from any capsule description provided in the library catalog. Some books will be ideological paeans (i.e., purely positive), some ideological jeremiads (i.e., purely negative), some merely technical, and perhaps some seriously analytical and/or historical. The immediate question to ask is whether the library catalog makes available to the reading public a generally positive or negative impression and generally technical or analytical version of “capitalism.” From there, you now know enough to ask crucial follow-up questions. Immediately obvious ones are: What do the books associate “capitalism” with? Democracy? Freedom? Unfreedom? Autocracy? What do they think “capitalism” is, and what do they think are its positive and negative elements, based on those associations? Where is “capitalism”? In the United States? Europe? China? Everywhere in the whole world? Do they imagine particular kinds of “capitalism”? Do they imagine alternatives to “capitalism”? Is “capitalism” healthy, or broken? Et cetera. Finally, the hardest questions: What is missing from the library catalog? What do the books NOT enable the reading public to consider and think about? What is made visible, and what are the blindspots? In other words, what is included in “common knowledge” and what is left out! Once you gather what is available in the local library, it will be your task to analyze the book titles — in light of the other material that we have covered about the cultural invention of “capitalism” as a shorthand concept with objectified reality status, ever since the 1920s. It should be obvious that there is no single right or wrong answer to this question; the library catalogs will vary from town to town. Rather, you will be evaluated on your ability to develop a forceful yet nuanced argument structuring your analysis, to pinpoint main themes to organize your analysis into coherent paragraphs, and to provide specific evidence from the book titles, the readings, and your lecture notes. Be sure to endnote/footnote the precise source of any quotations, derivative ideas, or uncommon facts. There is no need to do any additional outside research. Have fun with the catalog searching, and with the analysis. |