ENGL 200 D: Reading Literature: Literature in the Marketplace

The optional reading, an excerpt from Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety, is here, as well as being linked on the Course Readings page. It’s a section titled “Meritocracy,” and in it, de Botton writes about the history of how our conventional concepts of what it means to be poor and rich have changed over time. By “what it means to be poor,” I mean our assumptions about whether the poor and rich are useful, and on what basis we say that they deserve their fate.

The whole reading is about 26 pages, but I particularly recomnmend that you read pp. 47-54, which I think you’ll find especially useful and interesting for the coming weeks.

You have a choice between two options for your Week #3 Blog post:

#1: pick two of the authors we’ve read so far (including Duck and Collier), and choose one point of economics (value, labour, property, credit, etc.) that you think they might have a conversation about. Perhaps they would strongly disagree; perhaps they would agree for entirely different reasons. Write about what they would say to each other. (You can be very creative with this if you wish, but you can also be quite straightforward, and say “Duck’s view on using credit would be…while Addison would say…” (The only restriction is that you may not use Swift AND Montagu, or Duck AND Collier — the idea being not to rehash the disagreements in their texts.)

#2: Read the optional reading (de Botton), which is about merit. Write about one place in one of the texts we’ve read so far where consideration of merit is either obviously important, or is strangely lacking.