Readings | American Dream: Exploring Class in the U.S. | Anthropology

This section features the required books as well as a listing of specific readings and films by session.

Required Books

Terkel, Studs. Working [1974]. New York, NY: New Press, 1997. ISBN: 9781565843424.

Alger, Horatio. Ragged Dick and Struggling Upward [1867/8]. Reprint ed. New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 1985. ISBN: 9780140390339. The e-texts are also available at Project Gutenberg: Ragged Dick, Struggling Upward.

Hamper, Ben. Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line. Reprint ed. New York, NY: Grand Central Publishing, 1992. ISBN: 9780446394000.

Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez: An Autobiography. Boston, MA: D. R. Godine, 1982. ISBN: 9780879234188.

Sittenfeld, Curtis. Prep: A Novel. New York, NY: Random House, 2005. ISBN: 9781400062317.

DeParle, Jason. American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare. Reprint ed. New York, NY: Penguin, 2005. ISBN: 9780143034377.

Readings and Films by Session

Course readings.
SES #	TOPICS	FILMS	READINGS
Introduction
1	Talking about class: Expanding inequalities in the 21st century	(no film)	Class Matters, a special series by The New York Times . Dash, Eric. "Off to the Races Again, Leaving Many Behind." The New York Times, April 6, 2006. DePalma, Anthony. "15 Years on the Bottom Rung." The New York Times, May 26, 2005. Johnston, David Cay. "Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind." The New York Times, June 5, 2005. Scott, Janny, and David Leonhardt. "Shadowy Lines That Still Divide." The New York Times, May 15, 2005. Wessel, David. "As Rich-Poor Gap Widens in U.S., Class Mobility Stalls." The Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2005.
2	Studs Terkel's Working	People Like Us	Working. Introduction, Books 3, 5 (skip the third section), 8, and 9 (pp. 521-543 only). People Like Us. PBS.
3	Anthropology, narrative, and social class Doing "auto-ethnographies"	American Tongues	Reed-Danahay, Deborah. "Introduction." In Auto-Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. New York, NY: Berg, 1997. ISBN: 9781859739754. Ewick, Patricia, and Susan Silbey. "Subversive Stories and Hegemonic Tales: Toward a Sociology of Narrative." Law and Society Review 29, no. 2 (1995): 197-226. American Tongues. Directed by Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker, 1987.
Theorizing class: Competing frameworks
4	Theories of class - Part I: Marx and Weber	(no film)	Williams, Raymond. "Class." In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society [1976]. Revised ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 60-69. ISBN: 9780195204698. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Weber, Max. "Class, Status, Party." In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology [1905]. Edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York, NY: Routledge, 2007. ISBN: 9780415436663. ———. "The Spirit of Capitalism." In The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New ed. Translated by Stephen Kalberg. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. ISBN: 9780631230816.
5	Theories of class - Part II: Bourdieu and post-structuralism	(no film)	Bourdieu, Pierre. "The Aristocracy of Culture." In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, pp. 11-96. ISBN: 9780674212770. Gibson-Graham, J. K. "Class and the Politics of Identity," and "Towards a New Class Politics of Distribution." Chapters 3 and 8 in The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1996. ISBN: 9781557868633.
6	Intersecting identities: Class, race, and gender	Paris is Burning	Ortner, Sherry. "Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and Culture." In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Edited by Richard G. Fox. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991. ISBN: 9780933452787. Gregory, Steven. "The Changing Significance of Race and Class in an African-American Community." American Ethnologist 19, no. 2 (1992): 255-274. Paris is Burning. Directed by Jennie Livingston, 1992.
Narratives of class in the U.S.
7	Searching for the American dream: Narratives and counter-narratives of upward mobility	Modern Times	Alger, Horatio, Jr. Ragged Dick and Struggling Upward. Especially pp. 3-132 (it's very quick reading) as well as the oral history selections. Holt, Hamilton, ed. The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999. ISBN: 9780415925105. Modern Times. Directed by Charlie Chaplin, 1936.
8	Class and race in black women's auto-biographies from the 1930s and 1940s	(no film)	Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Track [1942]. New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006, chapters 1-4, 8, 9, and 12. ISBN: 9780060854089. Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1980, introduction, chapters 1-5, 7-10, 15, 18, 23, 25, and 28. ISBN: 9780553139044.
9	The post World War II middle class	The Graduate	Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes [1951]. 50th anniversary ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002, chapters 4 and 10-12. ISBN: 9780195157086. Cheever, John. "The Worm in the Apple," and "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill." In The Stories of John Cheever. New York, NY: Vintage, 2000. ISBN: 9780375724428. The Graduate. Directed by Mike Nichols, 1967.
10	On the American Assembly Line: A vanishing industrial working class?	Roger and Me	Hamper, Ben. Rivethead. Roger and Me. Directed by Michael Moore, 1989.
11	The Worlds of the rich	Born Rich	Sittenfeld, Curtis. Prep: A Novel. Born Rich. Directed by Jamie Johnson, 2003.
12	Up and down: From climbing the social ladder to a fear of falling	(no film)	Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory.
13	Welfare and the politics of the U.S. "underclass"	When the Levees Broke	DeParle, Jason. American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and A Nation's Drive to End Welfare. (Selections) When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Directed by Spike Lee, 2006.
Conclusion
14	The politics of red and blue, rural and urban, and a widening social gap	(no film)	(no readings)