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CS92PROD
Time Is Money: Capitalism and Temporality
CHUM 322
Fall 2012
Section: 01  
Crosslisting: ENGL 315, AMST 356, HIST 273

What does it mean for us to live by the clock? And how has the clock come to command our sense of time? To explore these and related questions, in this interdisciplinary, reading-intensive seminar, we will work from two core premises: the quality of temporality--or, how we inhabit, perceive, and regulate time--has changed over the course of history (itself a term we will need to unpack), and those changes have corresponded to fluctuations in the rate and rhythm of global capitalism. Centering our inquiry in the United States and beginning in the antebellum South, we will toggle between different spatio-temporal scales and examine a range of case studies, from the cotton plantations of the 1830s and the future markets of the 1880s, to the shopping malls of the 1960s and the childcare centers of the 1980s. Throughout, we will analyze time as an instrument of domination and expropriation and, thus, of capital accumulation, but also as a means of disruption and interruption and, thus, of opposition, whether it is "seized" along an assembly line or in a public square, or within the structure of a novel.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA CHUM
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (AMST)
Past Enrollment Probability: Not Available

Last Updated on MAR-29-2024
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