Literature and Money

At a time when the dull rationality of the money calculus seems to be making ground in every sphere, it is perhaps opportune to reopen the question of literature and its relations with a rationality defined according to the logic of economic exchange: what kinds of value flow from such a rationality and what possibilities of resistance are there if we happen not to like the model and its more rebarbative ideological implications? Historically, attempts to reduce the richness of human exchange to utilitarian or economic paradigms have met with counter-cultural expressions of dissent and defiance. And yet the search for an 'authentic community' outside the reifications and repressions of economic exchange presents its own ambiguities and pitfalls, since the attempt to ground value in other spheres can function ideologically to secure and legitimize the very values it seeks to oppose. This is especially true in literature and other expressions of high culture, where mobilizations of the aesthetic (or the textual) as a site of resistance to economic hegemony are frequently recuperated in advance by the dominant discourse. The essays collected here tend, then, to explore in various ways, not only the ideological implications of literary (or more broadly cultural) representations or constructions of economic exchange, but also the often complex mediations that such constructions enter into with different kinds of oppositional discourse.