The Fictions of American Capitalism: Working Fictions and the Economic Novel (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics)

Acknowledgments\nContents\nNotes on Contributors\nList of Illustrations\nChapter 1: The Fictions of American Capitalism: An Introduction\n	The 2008 Crisis as Seen Through the Prism of Fiction\n	Which Theory of Capitalism Informs This Collection?\n	Why Focus on American Capitalism in Relation to Fiction?\n	How Fictions Work Under “Uncertainty Regimes”\n	Interrogations on Transfictionality: Axiological Issues\n	A Fictional Turn to the Real\n	To Conclude, Temporarily\n	Facets of Fiction in American Capitalism: A Guided Tour of This Book\n		Three Theoretical Insights\n		Non-literary Fictions Bolstering American Capitalism\n		Novelists and the Fictions of Capitalism\n	Prospects\n	Bibliography\nPart I: Theoretical Overviews\n	Chapter 2: From Economics as Fiction to Fiction-Led Capitalism\n		Introduction\n		From British Political Economy to American Economics\n			Comparing Two Epochs via Two Dictionaries\n			The Aborted American Institutionalism\n		The Two Founding Principles of Economics\n			Physics Modeling in Economics\n			Unrealistic Hypotheses, Generality of the Theory\n		The Invisible Hand: An Unproved Fiction\n			No Money, No Credit, No Banking\n			A Static Theory, No Historical Time\n			Fictional Literature: A More Relevant Representation of Capitalism?\n		Contemporary Economists Create Fictional Worlds\n			A Multiplicity of Ad Hoc Hypotheses\n			Never Any Falsification: Anything Goes\n		An Unexpected Ally of Economic Fictions: Rational Expectations\n			Every Actor Becomes a Walrasian Auctioneer\n			A Necessary Ingredient for Closing Economic Fiction Models\n			Historical Processes Are Replaced by Stochastic Exogenous Shocks\n		Storytelling vs. Mathematical Finance\n			The Past Informs the Future\n			The Future Against the Past\n		Forecasting: The Need for Common References in an Uncertain and Complex World\n			The Failure of Sophisticated Statistical Techniques\n			Representations and Fictions Enable Individual and Collective Actions\n		Capitalism as Fiction-Led\n			The Need to Overcome Radical Uncertainty\n			Contemporary Capitalism: Dominated by Fiction-Led Finance\n			When Fiction Becomes Fictional: From Boom to Crisis\n		The Fictional Turn of Political Economy\n		Conclusion\n		Bibliography\n	Chapter 3: Capitalism: Anticipating the Future Present\n		The Temporal Dispositions of Capitalism\n		Imagined Futures\n		Expectations\n		Fictional Expectations\n		Fictional Expectations in American Capitalism\n			Financial Markets\n			Human Capital\n			Consumption\n		Conclusion\n		Bibliography\n	Chapter 4: The Cultural Fix: Capital, Genre, and the Times of American Studies\n		Fixing Capital: The Commodity-Form\n		The Cultural Fix\n		Genre as Cultural Fix\n		Bibliography\nPart II: Non-Literary Fictions of American Capitalism\n	Chapter 5: “Tell Me a Story”: How American Capitalism Reinvents Itself Through Storytelling\n		What Is Storytelling?\n		Legitimizing the Post-Fordist Model\n		Who Tells the Stories? A Polyphonic Narrative\n		Conclusion\n		Bibliography\n	Chapter 6: The Boundless Economy: An Enduring Performative American Fiction?\n		The Grand Narrative of Space\n		From History to Mythology and Back\n			The History of American Capitalism: A Growth Story\n			A Vision with Blind Spots: Boundlessness as Abstract Space and Fictitious “Make-Believe”\n		Temporal Shifts of Boundlessness: Narratives of “Achieved Utopia” and US Capitalism’s Special Relationship with the Future\n			The American Dream: Objections to Boundlessness Overruled\n			Specifics of American Capitalism’s Relation to the Future\n			Credit as an Expression of Unlimited Desire Within the US Economy\n		Conclusion: Current Doubts About the Boundlessness of the American Economy\n		Bibliography\n	Chapter 7: American Entrepreneurship as Action Translated into Heuristic Discourse\n		Narrating the Entrepreneur’s Quest or the Textualization of Past Experience as Phronesis\n			The Success Life Story of the Heroic Entrepreneur as the Standard, Hagiographic “Vita” Tale\n			“How I Did It” Stories or the Personal Trajectory, Firm Foundation, and/or Strategic Development Story\n			“War Stories” or the Lonesome and Paranoid Quest of the Entrepreneur as Maverick and Rebel\n		The Technè Narrative or the Textualization of Know-How Through Tips and Methods\n		The Gnosis Narrative: Describing Entrepreneurship as the Textualization of Episteme\n			The Gradual Building of a Unified Entrepreneurship Research Episteme\n			The Emergence of a Field of Research and the Institutionalization of a Discipline Through Cognitive Fictions and “Fictions de Méthode”\n		The Bigger Picture\n		Conclusion\n		Bibliography\nPart III: Literary Representations of Capitalism\n	Chapter 8: The Woman Proprietor in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner: Social Reform Novel as Paradigm of John Stuart Mill’s Liberal Political Economy\n		Mill’s Progressive Political Economy\n		Mill’s Paradigm at Work in The Silent Partner\n		Phelps’s Capable Working Woman\n		Bibliography\n	Chapter 9: William Dean Howells and the Economic Novel: Heteronomy and Autonomy\n		Bibliography\n	Chapter 10: The Theory of Monopoly and the Crafting of the Modern Epic: Frank Norris’s The Octopus as Populist Drama?\n		The Intellectual Challenges of the Modern Epic\n		The Octopus and Agrarian Theories of Monopoly\n		Political Economy as a “Jumble of Conflicting Notions”\n		The Octopus as Ambiguous Epic\n		Bibliography\n	Chapter 11: Naturalism and Economic Calculability\n		Bibliography\n	Chapter 12: Living on Paper: Disarticulating a Racialized Capitalism in Works by Richard Wright and Ann Petry\n		The Daily Worker, the New Masses, 12 Million Black Voices: Richard Wright’s Perspective\n		The People’s Voice and The Street: Ann Petry’s Sensorial Social Criticism\n		Conclusion\n		Bibliography\n	Chapter 13: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: “Laissez-Faire” Fiction?\n		Introducing Ayn Rand’s Views on Fiction, Romanticism, the Novel and Why Atlas Shrugged Makes a Problematic Plea for Capitalism as the Vector of Freedom\n		The Consistency Imperative Creates a Bubble, “Trimming” Life of Its Complexity\n		The Double-Edged Resort to Dystopia\n		A Didactic Epic Means a Failed Great American Novel\n		Rand’s Populist Fiction of Laissez-Faire: Capitalism Beyond Economics?\n		The American Novel: From the Pulpit to the Hustings\n		Conclusion\n		Bibliography\n	Chapter 14: “Building the Clutter, Widening the Vacancy”: Capitalism and Baroque in William Gaddis’s JR\n		Preambular Sentences\n		About the Baroque\n		A Lost Sense to Start\n		A “Mimetic of Nothingness”\n		Prestigious Wall Street\n		Capitalist Baroque Assemblage\n		(Creative) Destruction\n		One Flower\n		Bibliography\n	Chapter 15: Money Narratives in Postmodern Fictions by Paul Auster and Martin Amis\n		Bibliography\n	Chapter 16: Revisiting Business History Through Capitalist Fiction: The Glove-Making Industry in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral\n		“Thinking Representatively” Through Capitalist Fiction\n			Approaching American Capitalism Through the Fictional History of a Family Glove Business and Its Trade\n			Reconstructing and Re-embedding the Entrepreneurial Adventure of a Family and Its Glove Business into American Political Economy\n				The Emblematic Vita Tale of an American Post-war Entrepreneur: From High to Low Fortune\n			Tracing and Explaining the Development Path of the Levov Dynasty and Its Glove Business: From Heroic Entrepreneurship to Managerial Decline\n			From Immigrant/Ethnic Entrepreneurship to “Break-out” and “Breakthrough” Entrepreneurial Strategies\n			From Triumphant Corporate Entrepreneurship to Inadequate Welfare Capitalism\n			The Fall of the House of Levov: From Entrepreneurship Obsolescence, Old Craft Nostalgia, to Personal Petrification\n		American Pastoral as a Historiographic Research and a Critical Cognitive Method for Understanding American Capitalism\n			A Fictional Research Text to Inquire into American Political Economy and Its Changing Regimes from Business History to Political Economy Historiography\n			Historicizing American Capitalism Development Through Fiction\n			How Novels Think: A Fictional Method to Read and Write American Capitalism\n				The Novel as a Cognitive Quest for Truth\n				The Novel’s Quest for “Fictional Factuality” and Political “Allegories”\n			Fiction as a Research Method or “The Rationality of Literature”\n			A Political Economy Novel with a Strong Epistemic and Critical Intent\n		Bibliography\n	Chapter 17: Thomas Pynchon’s Dumps: Subversive Developments\n		Bibliography\nPart IV: Coda\n	Chapter 18: Economic Humanities: Literature, Culture and Capitalism\n		Introduction\n		Economic Writing\n		The Search for a Capitalist Hero\n		Economics in/of Literature\n		New Economic Criticism\n		Content of the Form\n		Fictions of Finance\n		Conclusion: Economic Humanities\n		Bibliography\nIndex