English 8001: Innovation: A Cultural History of the Contemporary Concept
Tuesday 3:00-5:45, State Hall 303 (subject to change)
Professor John Patrick Leary
Email: jpleary@wayne.edu
Office: 5057 Woodward, #10201
Office Hours: Tuesdays 12-2, or by appointment. Office hours are designated times when I am
available to meet with students one-on-one. These hours are for you to use as you wish, whether
you want to discuss the readings or your own woek, wish to make some special request (like
letters of recommendation), or just to chat informally.
“Innovation” is a word on nearly everybody’s lips: it is the rare term that finds favor in both
university classrooms and corporate boardrooms, in all parts of the country, in opposing political
parties, and in a variety of professions. Silicon Valley CEOs, academics, humanitarian
organizations, and even Christian pastors all profess a passion for “innovation” and a desire to
nurture it. Despite its modern vogue, however, it is a term with a long and surprising history.
Originating as a pejorative term for religious heresy in early modern Europe, “innovation” is
increasingly synonymous with “creativity,” making it a focal point for the intersection of
business and aesthetics. Despite its contemporary importance, however, its history is relatively
unstudied. This class will start to fill in these gaps by asking the following questions: What is the
history of this concept, and what is behind the dramatic shifts in its meaning? What links
“innovation” and past mythologies of American capitalism?
We will explore “innovation” as one of what the literary scholar Raymond Williams calls
“keywords”: “binding words,” elements of a living vocabulary that shape and reflect what a
society holds in common. In this class, we will explore the historical meanings embedded in
language we use everyday.
At this point in the syllabus the course “learning outcomes” are listed:
● Demonstrate analytical and critical knowledge of relevant primary and secondary texts.
● Locate and contexualize a research topic within a broader field.
● Apply key methods for advanced research in the field.
● Participate as a scholar within ongoing critical conversations in the field.
Required texts:
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Caroline Kirkland, A New Home, Who'll Follow?
Katherine Losse, The Boy Kings
Optional, and preferably stolen: Hanley Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma
Requirements:
Research presentation: On February 2, each student should be prepared to present on an instance
of “innovation” in a literary or newspaper database of your choosing. You should also turn in a
brief (2-4 page) critical analysis of the text you choose.
In-class participation and the Keywords method: This is a small seminar, and for it to work
everyone needs to be not only physically present, but intellectually present as well. So each day,
I will go around and ask everyone to speak a bit on the relevance of a keyword, which you will
choose at the beginning of the term, to the readings that day. You should use Williams’
Keywords to trace, throughout the class readings, a keyword cognate from Williams’ text. Since
Williams does not mention “innovation” itself, we will pick keywords that are related to the
concept and the readings: for example, “society,” “creativity,” “capitalism,” or “management.”
Come prepared to use their chosen concept as a tool to understand the readings. You do not need
to spectacularly and brilliantly synthesize everything, but rather use the keyword to ask specific
questions about a particular text or broader questions about connections and contradictions
between them. What questions does Williams help you ask? How does it help you work through
the concepts in the readings? What kinds of questions do the readings ask that Williams does
not? How, for example, does Williams’ analysis of “creativity” help us understand Benjamin
Franklin’s autobiographical self-fashioning or Wendy Brown’s understanding of homo
economicus?
Writing assignments:
The writing for this class will be relatively light, page-number-wise. However, this is because we
will focus on intensive work in academic genres. One written assignment, due by April 19
(though you may submit it earlier if you like) will be a book review of one of the critics we are
reading (i.e., Pope, Brown, North, Godin, Spence, Brouillette, Chandra), in the style of academic
journals. (More on this).
Your final paper will be a conference paper (with an abstract and a list of three conferences you
would like to submit it to) on anything relating to the course topic that fits your interests.
Because you’re encouraged to submit the paper to an actual conference, it should be related to
your own work.
Innovation, Creativity, Heresy, and Orthodoxy: Roots of the Concepts
January 12: Why creativity (and innovation) now?
Rob Pope, “Why Creativity Now?” from Creativity: History, Theory, Practice
Percy Shelley, “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni”
John 1:1-26, New International Bible
Evgeny Morozov, “Our Naïve Innovation Fetish,” The New Republic
John Patrick Leary, “Keywords for the Age of Austerity: Innovation,” from
theageofausterity.wordpress.com
January 19: Keywords
Raymond Williams, Keywords, introduction and selected entries
January 26: Innovation as a theological category
Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New, introduction and Ch. 2
Benoit Godin, Innovation Contested: The Idea of Innovation Over the Centuries, Introduction
and ch. 4
Francis Bacon, “Of Innovations”
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (excerpts)
February 2: Student presentations
Using one of the full-text scholarly databases we discuss in class (Wright American fiction,
Perseus Digital Library, Proquest Digital Library, one of the newspaper databases, etc.), in-class
presentations on a pejorative and salutary appearance of “innovation.”
February 9: “Neoliberalism” as a historical and analytic category
Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, esp. chapters 1, 3, 4, 6.
Lester Spence, Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, esp. the
introduction and chapter 3
Yankee Ingenuity and Myths of Accumulation
February 16: Self-branding: An American tradition?
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
Tom Peters, “The Brand Called You,” Fast Company, August / September, 1997
February 23: Land speculation and American development
Caroline Kirkland, A New Home, Who’ll Follow?
Paul Gates, “The Role of the Land Speculator in Western Development”
March 1: The limits of ingenuity
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Optional: John Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America,
1776-1900, chap. 5, “Technology and Utopia”; Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace:
Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920, chap. 4
Innovation and Technology
March 8: Nothing original, yet everything new: creative destruction in theory, practice,
and aesthetics
Joseph Schumpeter, “The Theory of Creative Destruction” from Capitalism, Socialism, and
Democracy
Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America, chapter 1
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” esp. chapter 1,
“Bourgeois and Proletarians”
Poetry: Philip Levine, “What Work Is,” “Belle Isle, 1949” “Animals Are Passing From Our
Lives,” “A New Day”; Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”; Gwendolyn Brooks,
“kitchenette building”; Alissa Quart, “Solarised,” “Views,” “Driftwood”
March 15: No class (spring break)
March 22: Creativity and the office
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End
Sarah Brouillette, “The Psychology of Creativity” from Literature and the Creative Economy
“Free Love Freeway,” The Office (UK)
March 29: Disruptive innovation: some of the contemporary canon
Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma, esp. introduction, chap. 1, and chap. 10
Everett Rogers, Diffusions of Innovation, esp. chapter 4, “The Generation of Innovations”
Jill Lepore, “The Disruption Machine,” The New Yorker
Optional: Diana Strassman, “The Stories of Economics and the Power of the Storyteller,”
History of Political Economy 25:1 and Christensen and Raynor, The Innovator’s Solution, chap.
1; Andrew A. King and Baljir Baatartogtokh, “How Useful Is the Theory of Disruptive
Innovation?” MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 2015
April 5: The Gender of Facebook
Katherine Losse, The Boy Kings
April 12: Management literature and postmodernism
Sarika Chandra, Dislocalism, introduction and chap. 1
Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, part 1, “The Creative Age”
Selected managerial lit TBA
April 19
Final paper workshops