Module Content and Indicative Topics

With literary texts as the primary focus, this course looks at representations of shopping and consumer culture across the past two hundred years, to examine the diverse forms of this ubiquitous aspect of contemporary subjectivity and society. We will draw on a wide range of philosophical and historical arguments, including (most recently) the relation between consumer cultures and sustainability.

Although it has only recently come to the fore as a topic for historical analysis, shopping has been a significant feature of everyday life in developed societies since the 19th century. Initially associated primarily with women, it is increasingly gender-inclusive (men shop too). A figure called ‘the consumer’ appears in different discourses and different roles —from vulnerable to distracted to the rational equivalent of homo economicus. Since the 1980s, an ideology of individual ‘choice’, ultimately derived from shopping, has become naturalized within practices formerly associated with collective provision, such as health and education. Shopping itself is represented in diametrically opposed ways, from the pleasure of an outing (‘going shopping’) to the dullness of a daily routine (‘doing the shopping’).

Primary texts studied may vary from year to year, but normally include the following:

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Honoré de Balzac, ‘La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote’ (‘At the Sign of the Cat and Racket’) (1829)

Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne (The Painter of Modern Life) (1863)

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)

Allen Ginsberg, ‘A Supermarket in California’ (1956)

George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891)

Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman (2016)

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840)

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Emile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise) (1883)

Teaching Delivery

The course is taught in weekly two-hour seminars, with the first hour an informal lecture and the second hour involving input from every student. It’s a key element of the course that everyone contributes every week.

By the end of the module students will have acquired knowledge about the history of consumer culture and the literary texts read each week. They will also be able to situate, analyse, and contribute to theoretical and political arguments about consumer culture and shopping.

Recommended Reading

In preparation, you are advised to read as many as possible of the primary texts listed above: in particular the longest ones: the novels by Dreiser, Gissing, Woolf, and Zola.