"The Business of Strangers: Cultural Critique/Corporate Americas"

“They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically,” wrote William H. Whyte in The Organization Man, his groundbreaking 1953 analysis of the effects of corporate culture on the American employee. “They are caregivers of corporations, which would be more satisfactory if corporations were not essentially balance sheets,” writes Roger Ebert in his 2011 review of the feature film The Company Men.
Who are “they”? How are they represented and received in the past, but particularly in the present, and especially in light of the Enron and BP scandals, the wild fluctuations of Wall Street, this seemingly-endless “Great Recession”? —What about these clerks and caregivers, interns, junior executives, and CEOs? What are their values and lifestyles and struggles as represented both by business disciplines dedicated to improving workplace productivity and by literary fiction and film reflecting the consequences of those business initiatives on the lives of American workers and the global society at large?
Those are the essential questions of this course, one that investigates the strange yet often intimate associations between U.S. business and literary cultures: the business of strangers. Seminar topics include the character of the “cultivated” corporate worker, from the strong individual to the merely dispossessed to the balance sheet statistic cast in settings and plot complications both real and imagined—the differences and similarities between Donald Trump as staged in The Apprentice and Donald Draper in the home and office theaters of Mad Men.
Course readings will vary in genre and historical period: from theoretical analyses of organizational governance posited by academic researchers, especially cultural critics, to assessment by insider business industry specialists. Thus we might apply both Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and business ethics professor Joseph Badaracco’s leadership principles in Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership through Literature to Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivener” or Douglas Coupland’s “Microserfs.”
Along with these titles, other print and film texts will be drawn from the following list: Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power; Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt; David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross; Daniel Orozco, “Orientation”; Walter Kirn, Up in the Air; Jason Bateman, Up in the Air; Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho; Mary Harron, American Psycho; Neil Labute, In the Company of Men; Patrick Stettner, The Business of Strangers; John Wells, The Company Men; David Frankel, The Devil Wears Prada; R. J. Cutler, The September Issue.
Texts and themes abound. We’ll sort through and review them in seminar discussions, short presentations and written analyses, the quarter concluding with your writing a final 10-12 pp. researched essay that lies within the scope of this course.