Description
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.
About the Author
Richard Godden is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine.
Reviews
Punctuating Capital represents a vital intervention in debates about literatureas critical purchase on contemporary financialisaton...By drawing out the connections between Marxas dialectical theory of production and Bakhtinas dialogic theory of language the work apprehends the amaterial record of the interrupted rhythmsa of productive labour in the very structures of the sentence itself. Written in Goddenas inimitably sophisticated but engaging style the work offers us a new and necessary historical arc for understanding fictionas 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. * Nicky Marsh, University of Southampton *
The abstractions of capital materialise themselves, like the movements of God, in mysterious ways. The demand that we attend to this process - to the elusive means by which 'the residues of production are retained within their evanescence' a is one of the most pressing challenges facing critical thinking today. In Punctuating Capital Richard Godden extends his peerless work on literature and economics to give the fullest and closest account we have of the capacity for literary language to register the continuing contradictions of contemporary capitalism. There is no other critic writing today who is able to show, with such force and precision, how the close reading of literary texts can reveal the material conditions of cultural life. * Peter Boxall, University of Sussex *
Punctuating Capital emerges like Athena from the godhead, or Daenerys from the flames, to stand as the premier account today of how language scores and is abbreviated by capital. In this dazzling account of fiction's registration of fictitious capital's exfoliation of responsibility for its persistent exploitation in the capitalist world-system, Punctuating Capital does more than remind readers about the requisite centrality of materialist approaches, like those of Volosinov, Bakhtin, and LukA!cs, to literary studies. Its acuity joins them at the summit. The readings carefully illuminate how capital's jerks and spasms rip society apart, even as it seeks to obscure this damage full stop. Newly classic. * Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick *
An incredibly exhaustive book that is unique in its erudition and mastery of complex economic mechanism, Fictions of Finance at the End of an American Century will doubtlessly capture the attention of anyone interested in contemporary American literature...The book's usage of close reading, however, offers a renewed outlook on the practice "as a means through which to recognize the historical density of utterance, and to sense the complexity of what enters our minds and comes out of our mouths" * Valentine Alloing, Transatlantica *
Book Information
ISBN 9780192867759
Author Prof Richard Godden
Format Hardback
Page Count 288
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 510g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 160mm * 20mm
About the Author
Richard Godden is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine.
Reviews
Punctuating Capital represents a vital intervention in debates about literatureas critical purchase on contemporary financialisaton...By drawing out the connections between Marxas dialectical theory of production and Bakhtinas dialogic theory of language the work apprehends the amaterial record of the interrupted rhythmsa of productive labour in the very structures of the sentence itself. Written in Goddenas inimitably sophisticated but engaging style the work offers us a new and necessary historical arc for understanding fictionas 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. * Nicky Marsh, University of Southampton *
The abstractions of capital materialise themselves, like the movements of God, in mysterious ways. The demand that we attend to this process - to the elusive means by which 'the residues of production are retained within their evanescence' a is one of the most pressing challenges facing critical thinking today. In Punctuating Capital Richard Godden extends his peerless work on literature and economics to give the fullest and closest account we have of the capacity for literary language to register the continuing contradictions of contemporary capitalism. There is no other critic writing today who is able to show, with such force and precision, how the close reading of literary texts can reveal the material conditions of cultural life. * Peter Boxall, University of Sussex *
Punctuating Capital emerges like Athena from the godhead, or Daenerys from the flames, to stand as the premier account today of how language scores and is abbreviated by capital. In this dazzling account of fiction's registration of fictitious capital's exfoliation of responsibility for its persistent exploitation in the capitalist world-system, Punctuating Capital does more than remind readers about the requisite centrality of materialist approaches, like those of Volosinov, Bakhtin, and LukA!cs, to literary studies. Its acuity joins them at the summit. The readings carefully illuminate how capital's jerks and spasms rip society apart, even as it seeks to obscure this damage full stop. Newly classic. * Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick *
An incredibly exhaustive book that is unique in its erudition and mastery of complex economic mechanism, Fictions of Finance at the End of an American Century will doubtlessly capture the attention of anyone interested in contemporary American literature...The book's usage of close reading, however, offers a renewed outlook on the practice "as a means through which to recognize the historical density of utterance, and to sense the complexity of what enters our minds and comes out of our mouths" * Valentine Alloing, Transatlantica *
Book Information
ISBN 9780192867759
Author Prof Richard Godden
Format Hardback
Page Count 288
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 510g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 160mm * 20mm
