ENG 225 The Fiction of Business
Though we often conceive as business as “the real world,” the history of business and capitalism depend upon imagined communities and created narratives. That is, the reality of business is built on foundations of fiction. This course examines the relationships between business and imaginative writing in three periods: the eighteenth century, when poets, novelists, and essays created moral justifications for capitalism and business; the nineteenth-century, when writers created rags-to-riches and perseverance narratives that still inform modern business writing; and the contemporary era, where novelists often grapple with the fictions that both support and expose modern business practices.