This book examines labour in the age of US hegemony through the art that has grappled with it; and, vice versa, developments in American culture as they have been shaped by work’s transformations over the last century. Describing the complex relations between cultural forms and the work practices,
Art, Labour and American Life explores everything from Fordism to feminization, from whitecollar ascendency to zero hours precarity, as these things have manifested in painting, performance art, poetry, fiction, philosophy and music. Labour, all but invisible in cultural histories of the period, despite the fact most Americans have spent most of their lives doing it, here receives an urgent re-emphasis, as we witness work’s radical redefinition across the world.
Table of Content
Introduction: life after the avant-garde.- 1 Proletarian realism, proletarian modernism: life in the Thirties.- 2 The managerial avant-garde: Hannah Arendt, John Cage and Jackson Pollock.- 3 The labour of mid-century leisure: grace, time and pastoral in Frank O’Hara’s work poems.- 4 Extraordinary measures: work, race and violence from Umbra to Gary, Indiana.- 5 Performing women’s work: Linda Montano, Bernadette Mayer and Karen Finley.- 6 Life and death: illness, labour and writing from Audre Lorde to Anne Boyer.- 7 Labour value and the web of life: the new century’s poetics of scale.- 8 Life at zero hours: language, networks and precarity since 2008.
About the author
Ben Hickman is Senior Lecturer in Modern Poetry and Director of the Centre for Modern Poetry at the University of Kent, UK, having studied at University College, London and the University of Kent. Recent publications include John Ashbery and English Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), and Poetry and Real Politics: Crisis and the US Avant-Garde (2016), also with EUP.
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