About the Course

Overview

This course examines depictions of finance, sales, entrepreneurship, and global business. Works studied will include novels, such as Mateo Askaripour’s Black Buck and Ling Ma’s Severance, and TV shows and films like The Office and The Big Short. Our goals are to understand what these works tell us about business ethics; what they argue about the role of business in society; and how they mediate business concepts and cultures into compelling, accessible stories.

Satisfies 3 credits of the General Education Humanities requirement. Non-English majors encouraged to enroll.

Course Info Video (Instagram Reel)

Objectives

This course is a collaborative, semester-long project. By exchanging ideas through conversations, presentations, and written work, you and your classmates will:

• Produce a shared understanding of how works of culture, specifically literature and film, represent the world of business and business concepts;

• Form arguments about what these representations say about ethics, social responsibility, and the role of business in our society; and

• Practice supporting those arguments through close reading and historicizing, fundamental methods of the English discipline.