|
Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > From 1900
|
Buy Now
Scandals and Abstraction - Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,066
Discovery Miles 10 660
|
|
|
Scandals and Abstraction - Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (Paperback)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
|
The Long 1980s could be summed up handily in the annals of U.S.
cultural history with the enduring markers of Ronald Reagan's
presidency, Oliver Stone's film Wall Street, and Dire Straits's hit
single "Money for Nothing." Despite their vast differences, each
serves to underscore the confidence, jingoism, and optimism that
powered the U.S. economy throughout the decade. Mining a wide range
of literature, film, and financial print journalism, Scandals and
Abstraction chronicles how American society's increasing concern
with finance found expression in a large array of cultural
materials that ultimately became synonymous with postmodernism. The
ever-present credit cards, monetary transactions, and ATMs in Don
De Lillo's White Noise open this study as they serve as touchstones
for its protagonist's sense of white masculinity and ground the
novel's narrative form. Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and
Oliver Stone's Wall Street animate a subsequent chapter, as each is
considered in light of the 1987 stock market crash and held up as a
harbinger of a radical new realism that claimed a narrative
monopoly on representing an emergent financial era. These works
give way to the pornographic excess and violence of Bret Easton
Ellis's epochal American Psycho, which is read alongside the
popular 1980s genre of the financial autobiography. With a series
of trenchant readings, La Berge argues that Ellis's novel can be
best understood when examined alongside Ivan Boesky's Merger Mania,
Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal, and T. Boone Pickens's Boone. A
look at Jane Smiley's Good Faith and its plot surrounding the
savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, concludes the
study, and considers how financial reportage became a template for
much of our current writing about of finance. Drawing on a diverse
archive of novels, films, autobiographies, and journalism, Scandals
and Abstraction provides a timely study of the economy's influence
on fiction, and outlines a feedback loop whereby postmodernism
became more canonical, realism became more postmodern, and finance
became a distinct cultural object.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
You might also like..
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
(4)
(2)
