Fictions of Finance at the End of an American Century

Punctuating Capital

Inbunden, Engelska, 2023

AvRichard Godden,Irvine) Godden, Prof Richard (Professor Emeritus, University of California

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Fictions of Finance at the End of an American Century explores how an economy determines the language of those who live among its imperatives--and how it makes available to them the stories that they can and cannot tell, and the manner of their telling. Read closely, fictional narrative may expose the historical structures that determine literary language use, and that of language more generally. The study, the fourth in a quartet of studies addressing the emergence and decline of a Fordist regime of capitalist accumulation, offers an account of 'the sub-semantic whispering' that haunts the literature of the financial turn--which is to say, an account of how the complexities of words and their histories register an expanding industrial economy's organizing contradictions and failures. Reading in the light of deindustrialization and the rise of US finance capital after 1973, it deploys and elaborates on a materialist theory of language that explains how syntactic as well as semantic structures register a financializing economy's core contradictions, those associated particularly with debt, risk, and volatility. The volume listens for the under-heard syntactical breaks that punctuate language under the global hegemony of finance, breaks that express the unuttered in all utterance, taking as its exemplary texts primarily works by Bret Easton Ellis, Jayne Anne Phillips, and David Foster Wallace.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2023-07-11
Mått160 x 240 x 20 mm
Vikt510 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieOxford Studies in American Literary History
Antal sidor288
FörlagOUP OXFORD
ISBN9780192867759

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Introduction: Punctuating Capital: Toward a Labor Theory of Language1: Incidents in the Life and Language of Debt2: Fictions of Fictitious Capital: American Psycho and the Poetics of Deregulation3: Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park, and the Exquisite Corpse of Deficit Finance4: No End to the Work? Jayne Anne Phillips and the Exquisite Corpse of Southern Labor5: Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite: Monetized War, Militarized Money--a Narrative poetics for the Closing of an American Century6: The Bodies in the Bubble: David Foster Wallace's The Pale KingAfterword: What's in a Word?

Punctuating Capital represents a vital intervention in debates about literatureâs critical purchase on contemporary financialisaton...By drawing out the connections between Marxâs dialectical theory of production and Bakhtinâs dialogic theory of language the work apprehends the âmaterial record of the interrupted rhythmsâ of productive labour in the very structures of the sentence itself. Written in Goddenâs inimitably sophisticated but engaging style the work offers us a new and necessary historical arc for understanding fictionâs apprehension of late twentieth century economic crises. A painstakingly elegant parsing of writers, including Brett Easton Ellis, Jayne Anne Phillips and David Foster Wallace, reinforces the political power of close critique.