Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s

by Leigh Claire La Berge

The Long 1980s could be summed up handily in the annals of U.S. cultural history with the enduring markers of Ronald Reagan's presidency, Oliver Stone's film Wall Street , and Dire Straits's hit single "Money for Nothing." Despite their vast differences, each serves to underscore the confidence, jingoism, and optimism that powered the U.S. economy throughout the decade. Mining a wide range of literature, film, and financial print journalism, Scandals and Abstraction chronicles how American society's increasing concern with finance found expression in a large array of cultural materials that ultimately became synonymous with postmodernism.

The ever-present credit cards, monetary transactions, and ATMs in Don De Lillo's White Noise open this study as they serve as touchstones for its protagonist's sense of white masculinity and ground the novel's narrative form. Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and Oliver Stone's Wall Street animate a subsequent chapter, as each is considered in light of the 1987 stock market crash and held up as a harbinger of a radical new realism that claimed a narrative monopoly on representing an emergent financial era. These works give way to the pornographic excess and violence of Bret Easton Ellis's epochal American Psycho , which is read alongside the popular 1980s genre of the financial autobiography. With a series of trenchant readings, La Berge argues that Ellis's novel can be best understood when examined alongside Ivan Boesky's Merger Mania , Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal , and T. Boone Pickens's Boone . A look at Jane Smiley's Good Faith and its plot surrounding the savings and lo
crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, concludes the study, and considers how financial reportage became a template for much of our current writing about of finance.

Drawing on a diverse archive of novels, films, autobiographies, and journalism, Scandals and Abstraction provides a timely study of the economy's influence on fiction, and outlines a feedback loop whereby postmodernism became more canonical, realism became more postmodern, and finance became a distinct cultural object.

Genres: Finance

240 pages, Hardcover

First published November 6, 2014

About the author

Her work concerns aesthetics and political economy, broadly speaking. Her first book, "Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s" (Oxford, 2014), tracked the convergences of finance, realism and postmodernism in literature and culture throughout the 1980s in the United States. Her second book, "Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art" (Duke, 2019) explored the twin rise of new forms of socially engaged art alongside what she called "decommodified labor," or labor that is not recompensed. Along with Alison Shonkwiler, she is the co-editor of the collection "Reading Capitalist Realism" (Iowa, 2014). She recently published a book about animality and economy entitled "Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary," with Duke UP. She is currently completing a new book called "Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect that Capitalism is a Joke" about her experience with corporate labor, Y2K, and management consultants.

Reviews

[stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's not enough to know what Frederic Jameson says about finance if you want to write about finance, even as a repertoire of images processed differentially in texts. It just isn't. That said, the analyses of the texts are often quite interesting.