Should I Stay or Should I Go? Is Opting Out a Choice? Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. by Herman Melville & two contemporary magazine articles on the “great resignation”.

In this course, Premise students will explore the questions: “Should I stay or should I go? Is opting out a choice?”

We will read one short story and two recent magazine articles to help us get at the enduring question of when we should opt out. We’ll look at how opting out can be both rational and radical, depending on the circumstances. Our conversation will be rooted in opting out when it comes to our labor, but we’ll likely touch on other ways we choose to opt-out in the rest of our lives.

We will read Herman Melville’s short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street." In the story, a Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk who, after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to make copies or do any other task required of him, refusing with the words "I would prefer not to." The story ends with the narrator saying, "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"

We’ll dig into the various meanings of these phrases and figure out why “I would prefer not to.” is slightly different from “I refuse.” Together, we’ll wonder how much room, if any, do we have in our lives to simply “prefer not to.”

Students will also read two short contemporary articles on the pandemic phenomenon dubbed “The Great Resignation” by the media.

We’ll discuss the phenomenon of the mass resignations that we see in the economy, and we’ll use “Bartleby, the Scrivener” as a point of comparison and contrast.

If you hear Melville and think about tomes like Moby Dick that are months-long reading commitments, you are in for a surprise with “Bartleby, the Scrivener”. The story can be read in a few hours but is packed with thought-provoking, conversation-worthy insight.

“Academics hail it as the beginning of modernism, but to readers around the world—even those daunted by Moby-Dick—Bartleby the Scrivener is simply one of the most absorbing and moving novellas ever. Set in the mid-19th century on New York City's Wall Street, it was also, perhaps, Herman Melville's most prescient story: what if a young man caught up in the rat race of commerce finally just said, "I would prefer not to"?

The tale is one of the final works of fiction published by Melville before, slipping into despair over the continuing critical dismissal of his work after Moby-Dick, he abandoned publishing fiction. The work is presented here exactly as it was originally published in Putnam's magazine—to, sadly, critical disdain.” -Goodreads Review

Instructor: Mary Finn
March 13 (Sunday): 4:00-6:00 PM PST*

*Class takes place by Zoom. We are a “cameras on” learning-community because we find it helps deepen the conversation and more quickly establish student-to-student connection.