This seminar explores the work that makes literature happen: the creative labor of writers, editors, designers, and publishers; the physical labor of printing, warehousing, shipping, and digitizing; and the intellectual labor of critics, readers, students, and teachers. We will combine ideas from cultural studies, book history, the sociology of the professions, and critical university studies to examine how labor processes and ideologies of work affect the creation and interpretation of literature in the 21st-century. Along the way, we will encounter concepts like Fordism and post-Fordism, immaterial labor, affective and emotional labor, precarity, contingency, entrepreneurialism, and the tensions between artistic autonomy and commerce. As a class and in individual research projects, participants will mobilize these concepts in readings of contemporary American short stories and novels.