Feedback Exhaust: Money and the Novel at the End of the Contemporary

Abstract

In the contemporary context of global financialization, the distance between the categories of money and fiction has been theorized as narrowing. This dissertation uses a Marxist analytic to argue that financialized money and fiction, as two modes of accounting, should be approached as competing forms of what Marx and Engels described as “world literature” and, therefore, as sites of ideological and material contestations understood as a manifestation of class struggle. Financial and monetary accounting functions are found to be used by contemporary novels to reconstitute the form’s traditional modes of expression in accordance with the historical changes in global economic structures. At the same time, contemporary approaches to money, debt, and accounting are found to exploit tropes and functions familiar to scholars of literary fiction. This dissertation attempts to sketch the stakes of a contest over narrative possibility in a period in which historical narratives tend toward the catastrophic, apocalyptic, and dystopian.