Property and Labor in American Literary Works

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The purpose of this project is to clarify how the notions of "labor" and "property" interpreted in American literary theories, and how those terms are utilized, analyzed, or transformed in actual literary texts. Because of the characteristics of literary study, when I researched into the notion of "labor," the category includes various concepts and phenomena around cultural matters. Thus, "labor" covers wide range of topics from female pregnancy to intellectual labor such as translation and copyright issues. As for "property," research interest does not limit its treatment of issues only to property right of material things, but to that of human beings. Therefore, slavery and slave labor in this institution overlap with both notions of "labor" and "property" in every aspect of American literary studies.The main activity of the project was targeted on holding regular research meetings with various members from all over Japan ; in the sessions, we read theoretical books such as American … More Exceptionalism, American anxiety : Wages, Competition, and degraded labor in the Antebellum United States by Jonathan A. Glickstein, Wealth and Democracy : A Political History of the American Rich by Kevin Phillips, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America : Essays in American Working Class and Social History by Herbert G. Gutman, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic : Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America by Alexander Saxton, Labor and Desire : Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America by Paula Rabinowitz, Myths America Lives by Richard T. Hughes, Radical Representations : Politics and Form in U. S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 by Barbara Foley, Political Fiction and the American Self by John Whalen-Bridge and so on. These theoretical works provided the foundation of the following stage of the project, namely, the analysis of each writer's texts with the perspectives of "labor" and "property."Especially, in the works of William Faulkner, my analysis was extended from the issues of slavery to the copyright matters which can be scrutinized from Faulkner's cooperation as a script writer in the Hollywood film industry. Since Hollywood script writers' and producers' political interests synchronized with their contemporaries' aesthetic representation, analysis of Faulkner's scripts and novels are also interpreted from other theoretical issues on "labor" and "property" ; "labor," in this case, includes Faulkner's own anxiety over his presence as a serious writer to pursue his arts and a script writer to earn money, while "property" includes intellectual property right on the products. Less