Annie McClanahan

Dead Pledges

Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

This book makes sense of the social, political, and conceptual consequences of the 2008 credit crisis by looking at the ways that our culture has sought to formally represent and politically respond to it.

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Produktdetails

• Post 45
• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 248
• Erscheinungstermin: 9. Januar 2018
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 14mm
• Gewicht: 394g
• ISBN-13: 9781503606586
• ISBN-10: 1503606589
• Artikelnr.: 50016569

Autorenporträt

Annie McClanahan is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1Behavioral Economics and the Credit-Crisis Novel
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 analyzes novelistic representations of the 2008 credit crisis.
Focusing on Jonathan Dee's The Privileges, Adam Haslett's Union Atlantic,
and Martha McPhee's Dear Money, it reads the post-crisis novel's interest
in individual psychology alongside and against the rise of behavioral
economics. Behavioral economists understand the financial crisis as a
consequence of individual choices and cultural climates: from excessive
optimism and irrational exuberance to greed and overweening self-interest.
At once mirroring and refuting these explanations, the post-credit-crisis
novel reveals a deep ambivalence about the model of psychological
complexity that undergirds both novelistic character and behavioralist
economics. Exploring these problems through experiments with narrative
perspective, these post-crisis novels suggest that the rich, full,
autonomous homines economici of both the realist novel and microeconomic
theory are bankrupt.
2Credit, Characterization, Personification
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 addresses the relationship between debt and personhood. Practices
for evaluating economic credibility in the late eighteenth century relied
on subjective, qualitative, narrative forms of evaluation and thus depended
on a realist model of literary character. By the early twenty-first
century, however, credit scoring had become objective, quantitative, and
data driven. Yet contemporary creditors still import the fictions of
personhood stripped from human subjects into the scores themselves. To
understand the perduring presence of the person, this chapter considers
both characterization and personification. Gary Shytengart's 2010 novel
Super Sad True Love Story attests to the persistence of racial
discrimination in "objective" credit scoring, while conceptual art by
Cassie Thornton, Occupy Wall Street debtor-portraits, and poetry by Mathew
Timmons and Timothy Donnelley register debt as a material and historical
force.
3Photography and Foreclosure
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 brings together a wide range of photographs-photojournalism, art
photography, and satellite images-that document the economic crisis with
images of abandoned homes. These photographs reveal the effects of the boom
and bust of the mortgage market on our view of the home. They also raise
questions about the politics of representation, especially when the
photographer's ability to enter the home depends on the power of the police
to process an eviction. Photographs of empty houses, it suggests, draw on
the aesthetics of what Freud termed the Unheimlich-unhomely, uncanny-to
register the uncanny power of property. Turning from photographs of single
houses to images of abandoned industrial landscapes and empty housing
developments, this chapter argues that such images foreshadow a financial
crisis to come.
4Houses of Horror
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 begins by noting that contemporary discourse on the economic
crisis is profoundly shaped by the language of horror and fear. To
understand why, this chapter turns to four post-crisis horror films that
explicitly link fear, foreclosure, and financialized credit: Drag Me to
Hell (dir. Sam Raimi), Dream Home (dir. Pang Ho-cheung), Mother's Day (dir.
Darren Lynn Bousman), and Crawlspace (dir. Josh Stolberg). All four films
take up real estate lending, mortgage speculation, and foreclosure risk and
locate horror in the "dead pledge" of the mortgage. Using horror and the
home-invasion genre to explore the shifting understandings of ownership
consequent to the housing crisis, these films frighteningly literalize the
doctrine of caveat emptor. Exploring the relationship between "paying back"
and "payback," they suggest that introduction of speculative risk has
shifted the social force of credit contracts from the promise of trust to
the threat of revenge.
Coda: The Living Indebted (on Students and Sabotage)
chapter abstract
The Coda to Dead Pledges explores an emerging anti-debt politics, arguing
that "debt strikes" and the occupation or sabotage of domestic space are
forms of protest that attempt to block capital at the point of circulation.
Exploring the economics of student debt and taking up the treatment of
education debt as an "investment in the future," this chapter suggests that
the politics of student debt illuminate the relationship between workers
and students and between the university and capitalism. It concludes by
exploring the emergence of what it terms "crisis subjectivity": a
demystified condition of radical percipience and canny knowing.