Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s

The greed, excess, and decadence of the long 1980s has been famously chronicled, critiqued, and satirized in epochal works like White Noise by Don DeLillo, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. Leigh Claire La Berge offers an in-depth study of these fictions alongside the key moments of financial history that inform them, contending that throughout the 1980s, novelists, journalists, and filmmakers began to reimagine the capitalist economy as one that was newly personal, masculine, and anxiety producing. The study's first half links the linguistic to the technological by exploring the arrival of ATMs and their ubiquity in postmodern American literature. In transformative readings of novels such as White Noise and American Psycho, La Berge traces how the ATM serves as a symbol of anxious isolation and the erosion of interpersonal communication. A subsequent chapter on Ellis' novel and Jane Smiley's Good Faith explores how male protagonists in each develop unique associations between money and masculinity. The second half of the monograph features chapters that attend to works-most notably Oliver Stone's Wall Street and Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities-that capture aspects of the arrogance and recklessness that led to the savings-and-loan crisis and the 1987 stock market crash. Concluding with a coda on the recent Occupy Wall Street Movement and four short stories written in its wake, Scandals and Abstraction demonstrates how economic forces continue to remain a powerful presence in today's fiction.

Table of Contents:
Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fictions of the Long 1980s Introduction Chapter 1. Personal Banking and Depersonalization in Don DeLillo's White Noise Chapter 2. Capitalist Realism: The 1987 Stock Market Crash and the New Proprietary of Tom Wolfe and Oliver Stone Chapter 3. "The Men Who Make The Killings": American Psycho and the Genre of the Financial Autobiography Chapter 4. Realism and Unreal Estate: The Savings and Loan Scandals and the Epistemologies of American Finance Coda

About the Author :
Leigh Claire La Berge is Assistant Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York and the coeditor, with Alison Shonkwiler, of Reading Capitalist Realism.

Review :
"Theoretically sophisticated and politically engaged, Scandals and Abstraction is a tour-de-force treatment of how financial logics circulated in 1980s' literature and culture. La Berge asks compelling questions and the answers she provides offer startling insights into some of the ways financialization has altered our lives." --Mary Poovey, author of Genres of the Credit Economy "Taking up the question--what is a financial age, and what is a financial aesthetic mode?--La Berge bypasses the now-familiar discovery of a genre of the finance economy to register the ways that financial logics have increasingly colonized literature as such, much as they have colonized the larger economy. In so doing, Scandals and Abstraction develops surprising categories and concepts in a bravura effort to reconcile Marxist and poststructuralist approaches. This is a dangerous game and period-defining intellectual quest; La Berge plays explorer in ways agile, nuanced, and innovative." --Joshua Clover, author of Of Riot "For the economists Kiyotaki and Moore, money is 'strange stuff.' Financial monies, in the apparent opacity of their workings, seem yet stranger. La Berge brings clarity to the financial turn by way of the founding assumption that the material practices of an economy--options, futures, derivatives--traceably contain the logic of its aesthetic forms. A template text for those who would understand cultural change at the close of the American century, Scandals and Abstraction is theoretically informed and intellectually graceful. I learned from it even as I enjoyed it." --Richard Godden, author of William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words