Charlie Tyson

I am a literary critic, focusing mainly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature, aesthetics, and intersections between literature and political economy. My first book project, The Art of Idleness: The Questioning of Work in Modern Literature, argues that literature, from the late nineteenth century forward, increasingly acts as a counter-voice against the religious celebration of work that reaches a crescendo in the Victorian period. The writers I study ascribe a new importance to states of passivity, repose, daydream, and other forms of nonproductive absorption, suggesting that it is here, outside the bounds of work, where imagination and contemplation can survive in the modern world. I show that the notion that idleness might be stylish, even heroic, is in large part a literary invention—and it is no accident that such an attitude is sponsored by a lavishly time-intensive art form that depends on free time for its reception and dissemination. 

My companion book The Gospel of Laziness—a lighter (and chronologically broader) study of the contemporary American work ethic, aimed at the general reader—contends that such ideas about leisure are more than fantasies; they are possibilities for human development that have been blocked by the enormous upward transfer of wealth that has reshaped American society during the last half-century. Ranging from medieval confessors’ manuals and Protestant sermons all the way through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, The Gospel of Laziness examines the existential costs of the contemporary work ethic, arguing that our worship of productivity severs us from beauty, sensation, and the pleasures of immediate experience, and increases our vulnerability to power. 

After receiving a B.A. in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia, I earned master’s degrees in English literature and in history of science at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship and completed a Ph.D. in English at Harvard. I am widely published as a critic and essayist: my writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, Bookforum, The Baffler, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other venues. My work has been translated into multiple languages (Turkish, French, Dutch). My interests are broad, and I welcome inquiries from potential collaborators.