Historian Judith Stein argues that in the late 1970s (with Jimmy Carter in the White House and the Democratic Party holding majorities in both houses of Congress) "assumptions that capital and labor should prosper together" were replaced by "an ethic claiming that the promotion of capital will eventually benefit labor-trading factories for finance." It was this turn, Stein argues, that ushered in the "Age of Inequality" that still defines our present moment. In this course we will explore the relation of postmodernism and works by major American fiction writers, including Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tom Wolfe, William Gaddis, to the rise of economic equality in the US. (20th/21st)