The Vexed Story of Economic Criticism

Abstract

Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, & Writing in the Making of Early America, Jennifer Jordan Baker. John Hopkins University Press, 2005. Panic! Markets, Crisis, & Crowds in American Fiction, Michael A. Zimmerman. University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Of all interdisciplinary couplings, perhaps the marriage between literary studies and economics has been the most tempestuous—the most likely to alternate between devotion and repudiation. On one hand, we have the desire for their intimacy—even their chiasmatic identity—the economics of literature and the literature of economics. On the other hand, we have the reassertion of the fundamentally different methodologies and archives of these two disciplines. Even attempts on the part of literary critics to articulate a New Economic Criticism, or on the part of economists to establish Rhetorical Economics—which is to say, attempts on the part of both disciplines to provide theoretically nuanced descriptions of the ways that their respective inquiries might usefully intersect—seem inevitably to describe the relationship between the disciplines as resembling nothing so much as Montaigne's perfect friend: “Love him … as if you are to hate him some day; hate him as if you are to love him” (140). Looking back at literary critical history, we see either demands that economic topics are so inextricably linked to cultural production as to be indistinguishable or we read screeds asserting literature's autonomy from the taint of commerce.

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