ENGL 200 D: Reading Literature: Literature in the Marketplace

Chelsea Hewitt MP1 Rough Draft This one is in Docx format

Chelsea-Hewitt-MP1-Rough-Draft This one is in Doc format

See my major paper 1 attached here in .docx (GerhardtT_RoughDraft.docx) and .pdf (GerhardtT_RoughDraft.pdf)

Major Paper 1-Rough Draft

Paper 1 rough draft (Becca)

The second round of conferences works in the same format as the first set: same groups, same round robin format.

There is one difference: you are expected to read each of your group members’ drafts, and comment on them, posting your comments to the blog post. Remember that you need to do this at least 24 hours before the conference meeting.

Conferences will again be held in Parnassus Coffee (if it’s noisy, we’ll grab one of the tables outside the main room).

You need to coordinate with your other group members to choose a conference slot. When you know which slot you want, have one person from your group comment on this post to claim it. If absolutely none of these slots work for your group, then please let me know ASAP, and we’ll find a time that *does* work.

There is no class on Wednesday or Thursday of next week.

Wednesday:

10:15-11:15 a.m.: Caitlin, Theresa, Inez, Phillip (pending confirmation from other group members)

11:30-12:30 p.m.: Vivian, Nathan, Becca, and Chelsea

1:00-2:00 p.m.

2:30-3:30 p.m.

Thursday:

10-11 a.m.

11:30-12:30 p.m.: David, Averi, Ashley, and Thomas

1:00-2:00 p.m.

2:30-3:30 p.m.

For my essay, I will address the issue of value in money and how money is valued in different ways. I think to answer, “what makes money challenging to use?,” I would use Gertrude Stein’s, “Money,” because it established that money has different interpretations for different people. To the normal, working class, money is truly money. Money is something that has value. It is something that we earn to make a living and to basically, survive in this world. “When you earn money, and spend money every day anybody can know the difference between a million and three….” Those who votes public money thinks differently. “Anybody who votes it to be gathered in as taxes knows money is not money.” That is evidence that money is difficult to use because what you think money is, may or may not differ from my view on money.

I am contemplating which I should use: Locke’s work or Adam Smith’s work. Both address the issue of labour and how labour has value. In Locke’s work, money is a tangible thing that doesn’t go to waste.  I just think it is appropriate to use either Locke or Smith’s texts to support that money has value but people have different views of value so that is why money is a challenge to use.

However, since I am going to use “value,” I want to use Swift’s poem to support that people view value differently. Yet, then I would have to tie in that idea with money. So I may or may not use that poem.

I don’t have a clear, concrete idea of what I’m going to do with the essay and I’ll probably change my initial approach.

I would like to write about why labor value is difficult to establish using Addison’s “Spectator 160” and Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments” to claim that there are actually two main decisions make when valuing labor. One decision, as Addison alludes to, deals with how useful the labor is for society as he discusses the two types of geniuses. The other decision, as Smith describes, deals with how highly we regard the actual person performing the labor. Where these paths cross to produce labor that is both useful to society and performed by a well recognized person, we tend to value labor very highly. However, most of the time labor does not fall at the upper end of each of these categories, but somewhere in the middle of each. It is when we weigh the two together that we become uncertain about the value of labor output by an individual.

This topic is interesting to me because we rate the value of others’ labor constantly in our purchases and hiring of services, and the decision can still be challenging due to any existing uncertainty in the value. The implications of our decisions are large, having impacts on the free market economy we are immersed in, yet the decisions we make can hang on a thread of certainty as we rate the labor needed to produce our desired product or service. The value placed on different types of labor determines payment, recognition from society, and social status. These are important factors to consider in any career choice, and greatly affect the economy and the lives of those in it.

Based upon these early ideas, I would like to claim that labor is difficult to establish because we are conflicted by our perceptions of what labor actually produces and who is doing it.

I have decided to answer the question “what makes labor value difficult to establish?” for Major paper one.  I think this question has a lot of depth to it and is very broad so the answer to it does not have to be a cliché response. I would like to take on the point of view that labor value is difficult to establish because there are many aspects of labor that are done in different fashions, even if it’s the same task. There is some labor that can be completed by humans, and then there is some that machines are able to do. The difficulty level fluctuates depending on who is performing the task, thus making the value of the work increase or decrease as well.

I am going to use Collier as well as Duck together to argue this point; I feel that although they have opposing arguments, they together can support my view on labor as a whole.  In addition to those two readings, I would like to incorporate the reading “Money” by Stein, because the value of money, as well as the value of the work has to be established to truly understand the value of the labor that is being done. So the points that I want to argue are… 1) That labor value is difficult to establish because the difficulty labor of that work changes depending on who is performing the task, whether it be man, woman, machine, or even animals, making the value change. And 2) I would also like to argue that the value of the money, or item of value being used to pay for that labor makes it difficult to determine the value of labor.

In this first assignment, I will use John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour to address the question of “why labor value is so difficult to establish.” This paper will expand on the idea that labor value is difficult to establish because labor has no intrinsic value. Rather, the value is decided by the individual who is directly benefiting from the labor, and often, this individual is not in fact the laborer.

I chose to use these two works because I feel that they are the two papers we have read that most directly address the issue of labor value. Beyond that, they are also in conflict with each other. In his paper Locke talks at great length about the high value of labor. On the other hand, Duck is a lowly field laborer, seeing little from his long hours working in the field. This conflict between the two authors is extremely important because it shows that there can be very different values placed on labor and that this is a question that deserves to be written about.

As of now, there are a few points I plan on making in my paper:

• Labor cannot have an intrinsic value because not all labor is the same. For example, in Thresher’s Labour, Duck describes how the women working in the field do significantly less then he and the other men do. Clearly, labour by some individuals is much more valuable.
• In Locke’s paper, he mainly discusses an individual working to collect what is necessary to survive. In this case, that individual is the only benefactor from this labor, so they are the ones to place value. This is why Locke is able to say that labor has such a high value and that it brings property.
• The reason that Duck doesn’t feel that he benefits directly from his labor is that he is not working for himself, rather he is working for someone else. Duck’s labor holds more value to the owner of the field than it does to Duck himself.

For the first paper I’m planning on answering the question “What makes labor value difficult to establish?” with the answer “Labor value is difficult to establish because though the quality and amount of labor should equal the quality of product, it doesn’t always. The two are not necessarily synonymous.” I plan on using Montague and Duck to argue different aspects of this answer

Montague is a good voice to use for this topic because the main conflict of her piece is a man who thinks that the fruits of his academic labors are good enough to buy a prostitute without paying her. This is essentially a difference in opinion on labor value. His social standing is his value and his peer group highly values it. He thinks he is being cheated because she didn’t do the work he paid her for, she didn’t labor for him. The two people in the poem have completely different views on what labor is and how value is assessed which supports my answer.

Duck will be useful because he is a laborer with obvious issues as to what his labor is worth. He not only gives his landlord the labor he provides during the day but he lives his whole life in servitude to them, his youth his health, even (though I’m not sure Duck specifically talks about it) the production of children is intended to produce more workers for the family. There is at least one section in his poem about how he and the landlord disagree about how hard the laborers have been working. Another is when the women come to work in the fields as well, he values his own labor but not that of the women’s at all even though it is the same work. The part about women I think will have to be an acknowledged as a difference in labor value just because they are women and therefore kind of annoying. That’s a whole different essay about labor value of the sexes that I’ll have to be careful to stay off my soap box.