Fictions of Finance At the End of an American Century - Punctuating Capital

Addressing the emergence and decline of US Fordism, this volume examines how an economy determines the language of those who live among its imperatives. It studies how the complexities of words and their histories derive from, and register, the organizing contradictions of an industrial economy, and of its failure.

List of contents

• Introduction: Punctuating Capital: Toward a Labor Theory of Language


• 1: Incidents in the Life and Language of Debt


• 2: Fictions of Fictitious Capital: American Psycho and the Poetics of Deregulation


• 3: Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park, and the Exquisite Corpse of Deficit Finance


• 4: No End to the Work? Jayne Anne Phillips and the Exquisite Corpse of Southern Labor


• 5: Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite: Monetized War, Militarized Money--a Narrative poetics for the Closing of an American Century


• 6: The Bodies in the Bubble: David Foster Wallace's The Pale King


• Afterword: What's in a Word?

About the author

Richard Godden is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine.

Summary

Addressing the emergence and decline of US Fordism, this volume examines how an economy determines the language of those who live among its imperatives. It studies how the complexities of words and their histories derive from, and register, the organizing contradictions of an industrial economy, and of its failure.

Additional text

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"

Product details

• Authors: Prof Richard (Professor Emeritus Godden, Richard Godden
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 11.07.2023
• EAN: 9780192867759
• ISBN: 978-0-19-286775-9
• No. of pages: 288
• Series: Oxford Studies in American Literary History
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; USA, English, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / General, Economic history, United States of America, USA, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, Semantics, discourse analysis, stylistics, Semantics, discourse analysis, etc