Leisure and Danger

The interaction between work and play has taken various forms in history. Our project in this course will be to examine the changes and continuities in the idea of leisure. Beginning in early modern Europe, we will trace the concept up to the present—concentrating on Europe and America and reflecting on subjects such as travel and the pursuit of the exotic, theatricality, consumerism, luxury, and display. In the 19th century, leisure became democratized, and an anxious debate grew louder. What were the implications of making leisure available to masses of people? From romance novels to cheap liquor, from shopping to the cinema, new avenues of leisure aroused both fear and excitement. Moralists felt a need to police both public and private space and to reassert the primacy of work, thrift, and duty. We will study them and the various forms of accommodations and resistance that met their efforts. Class, ethnicity, gender, and geography all acted to structure people’s access to leisure. We will look at struggles over race, gender, and popular culture; the way certain groups became designated as providers of entertainment; or how certain locations were created as places of pleasure. To set the terms of the debate, we will begin with some 18th-century readings about the theatre and the market, the salon and the court. Readings will include work of Montesquieu, Flaubert, Wilde, Wharton, George Eliot, and Fitzgerald. In addition, we will read works of nonfiction that show how leisure helped to create new forms of subjectivity and interiority. Students will be encouraged to work on conference topics linking leisure to a variety of subjects such as childhood and education, the construction of racial identities, or the changing nature of parenthood as birth control became more and more widely available, to name just a few areas. Potentially, this course—through the study of complex oppositions such as need and desire, purpose and aimlessness, the necessary and gratuitous—can give us a sense of the dizzying questions about life’s very meaning that present themselves when we aim at a life of leisure.