The Rich are Different from Us : We

To say “wealth” is to say “class,” which is also to say “manners” and “snobbery,” and, especially in America, is to say vaulting “ambition.” This course examines how the amassing of wealth --individual & corporate-- creates class tensions and social manners over the course of a century. And we will conduct this examination aware that to make these matters explicit disturbs some basic American habits of mind that prefer fictions of egalitarianism.
As Lionel Trilling observed in 1950:
“Americans appear to believe that to touch accurately on the matter of class, to take full note of snobbery, is somehow to demean themselves…We don’t deny that we have classes and snobbery, but we seem to hold it indelicate to take precise cognizance of these phenomena. As if we felt that one cannot touch pitch without being defiled.”   

Among the topics/figures to be studied: the “New Woman” divorcee (Wharton), the social climbing arriviste (Fitzgerald), the pathologies of wealth (Chesnutt, Fitzgerald), the Black elite (Chesnutt, West), corporate capitalism as it colonizes the human body (Powers), wealth and post modernism (Diaz).