ENGL 236NInequality: Economics, Philosophy, Literature

3 credits · English · Penn State

The Cubists were a group of painters including George Bracques, Pablo Picasso, working in Paris in the 1910s who, in addition to other painterly innovations, depicted objects not from one perspective but from multiple perspectives simultaneously. The final painting could sometimes look like a blur, but, or so the theory went, such multiplicity of perspectives could offer a truer, more complete representation of reality than any single perspective. In this class, we shall adopt a Cubist strategy of taking multiple perspectives. But instead of a guitar or a nude, our object of study will be inequality, and the multiple perspectives will not be different angles of seeing but different disciplines: economics, sociology, education, philosophy, and literature. How does each discipline define inequality? What does each have to say about it? And what does each argue, if anything, should be done about it? The class will mostly focus on economic inequality, but as you will discover, discussions of economic inequality quickly involve discussions of other forms of inequality (principally race and gender) besides economic inequality, and we shall consider those as well.