Economics and Literature

Dans les études comparées « droit et littérature » ou « économie et littérature », on cherche souvent en priorité ce que la littérature peut nous apprendre sur le droit ou l’économie. C’est prendre un risque : celui d’oublier la
dimension littéraire des textes étudiés. À plus forte raison, c’est prendre le risque de passer à côté d’un fait précieux, à savoir que la littérature est autre chose qu’un instrument talentueux assigné à la valorisation des thèmes qu’on lui livre : la littérature est plus que cela ! Elle sait elle-même user des autres – en l’occurrence, user du droit et de l’économie comme d’instruments, les mettre à son service. Il n’est pas rare que, ne cherchant pas à représenter ces deux univers, elle les détourne de leurs fins, les vide de leurs fonctions manifestes, mais en conserve mécanismes, raisonnements et vocabulaire : la littérature tire du droit et de l’économie des éléments de poétique qu’elle s’agrège et qui la renforcent, sans qu’elle se soucie de nous apprendre nécessairement quelque chose sur ces deux disciplines, objet de son pillage.
PLAN de l'article :
    Balzac/Piketty : la ruse de la Littérature
    L’inversion (des valeurs) de M. de Norpois : Qu’est ce que la littérature ?
        La carrière littéraire : à quel taux placer sa vie ?
        M. de Norpois ? Un bon inverti en vaut deux
        Tante Léonie ? Une valeur à investir
        L’« action nominative de la Compagnie des Eaux » : Contre Sainte‑Beuve appliqué
    Détournement du droit et de l’économie par la Littérature
    La Peau de chagrin : la vie est consomptible par le premier usage
        La lettre de change : qu’est-ce que la vie ?
        Le droit fantastique
        La Peau comme instrument du droit : une condamnation du littéralisme
        Confusion entre vie, argent et temps : d’une usure à l’autre
    « La fille de cuisine était une personne morale » : le droit, auxiliaire de la littérature

This paper aims to prove a correlation between economics and the arts, namely literature. I will primarily concentrate on the American economics of the 1920’s, specifically referring to The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Babbitt (1922) by Sinclair Lewis.  Discussing the presence of direct economic theory in literary works, such as the income elasticity of demand, affects drastic market expansion, income inequalities and the relative income hypothesis, as well as a study of the extent to which the current socio-economic state of affairs had an influence on The Great Gatsby and Babbitt, doing so with primary reference to Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Classes (1899) as well as relevant literary criticism and American economics and political history.

This article proposes a quantitative game-theory model of Jane Austen's _Emma_ as a basis for arguing that free-market moral philosophy underwrites Austen's representation of matrimony and key formal elements of her writing – in particular, matters of verbal profusion, such as concision and pacing. Austen's famed stylistic "economy" is revealed to be structured by the emerging capitalist economy theorized by Adam Smith in _The Wealth of Nations_. Establishing the correspondences among several kinds of economy – quantitative, capitalist, verbal, temporal – the essay unites formal and economic approaches to Austen's work.

Winner of the INCS Stein.Essay Prize for best article published in 2018.

מאמר זה עוסק ברומן הראשון של יוסף חיים ברנר, "בחורף", שהופעתו ב-1903 סימנה את הפריצה של הספרות העברית אל  המודרניזם. בניגוד לעוני החומרי שהעסיק את ברנר בקובץ הסיפורים הראשון שלו, "בעמק עכור", הרומן אינו עוסק בעוני אלא בהתרוששות נפשית, שסביבותיה אינן ידועות במלואן. ברנר מבצע שורה של המרות. הוא ממיר את העוני החומרי בהתרוששות נפשית, ומפתח גם טקסט עני, שרישולו המכוון קשור בהתרוששותה של הלשון. ככל שהרומן מתקרב לסיומו אובדות לגיבורו המילים, והוא אינו מסוגל להסביר את הסיבות למצוקותיו. גיבור זה, ירמיה פיארמן, בן דמותו של ברנר, נושא בתוכו סוד שהוא עצמו אינו מבינו. כך נוגע הטקסט בבלתי ניתן לביטוי,  מהלך המביא את הספרות העברית אל שערי המודרניזם האירופי.

For open access to the completed booke, please go to:
https://www.fulcrum.org/epubs/rj430528d?locale=en#/6/16[mup-mpsgoodman-0008]!/4/2[intro]/8/7:273
Also available for purchase on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Promissory-Notes-Literary-Conditions-Debt/dp/1643150006/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1539287871&sr=8-1&keywords=promissory+notes%3A+on+the+literary+conditions+of+debt&dpID=31PSdVpqg5L&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch

“Dirty Work: Labor, Dissatisfaction and Everyday Life in Contemporary French Literature and Culture (1975-present),” is an analysis of the representation of everyday activities – namely, of work, leisure, and consumerism – in contemporary French novels and other cultural productions. This dissertation examines how these contemporary texts use narrative, generic, and stylistic experiments to represent cynicism and dissatisfaction with everyday life as the consequences of neoliberal capitalist ideology and instrumentalist thinking, which define “work” as labor that produces commodities and profit and “leisure” as consumerism. In this way, these cultural productions critique capitalist instrumentalism for reducing human subjectivity to embodied economic struggle. I demonstrate how these texts portray dissatisfied laborers (and unemployed people) exhausted by unfulfilling work and financial precariousness, who implicate these conditions for thwarting their pursuit of more meaningful activities – artistic creation, meaningful work, love, community-building, political action – and existential freedom. By problematizing the effects of capitalist ideology, economic inequality, and received ideas about work and art, the texts in the corpus portray creative work, political consciousness, and social engagement as essential to contemporary individuals’ sense of subjective fulfillment and of belonging within French society.

The corpus of this dissertation includes a wide range of authors, from best-selling novelists to “cult” underground figures: works by controversial but popular authors Michel Houellebecq and Frédéric Beigbeder; newer literary voices Nathalie Kuperman, Gauz, and Julien Campredon; and punk and underground writers Virginie Despentes, Kriss Vilà, and Jean-Louis Costes. In addition to fiction, the corpus includes songs, zines, and journalism. I read these narratives of everyday life – literary fiction, genre fiction, subcultural fiction, and other texts – through a critical lens informed by continental and Marxist philosophy, literary theory (including aesthetic theory, postcolonial theory, structuralism and poststructuralism) and the social sciences. By recuperating the texts of subcultures for scholarly study, this dissertation also sheds timely critical light on texts overlooked by scholars for up to 43 years, illuminating their aesthetic and thematic correspondences with better-known works.

Note: to use or cite this work, or to read the full text, please download the full PDF from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9586x4bj - I would prefer that you cite eScholarship as the source because it helps me keep track of interest in my work. Many thanks.

Megaleh Temirin (Revealer of Secrets), first published in Vienna in 1819, is one of the sharpest and wittiest pieces of Jewish literature written in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is perhaps the most important piece of Hebrew prose composed before the stories of Mendele Mocher Seforim. A sly and complex story deriding Hasidism and Hasidim, it is told through the correspondence between the beadles of Hasidic courts and contemporary rabbis, and it presents a dark picture of  avaricious frauds and swindlers whose main concern was control over territory and the souls of believers, a goal achieved by beguiling the authorities and attacking all opponents. Perl lends his book a ‘Hasidic’ feel both in its physical design and in its language, presenting a Maskilic version of In Praise of the Ba’al Shem Tov that lays Hasidism bare so that no reader will ever be able to look at that, or any other Hasidic book, in the same way again. In addition to the book’s satiric sting, which would have been enough to bring its readers a dual pleasure, Perl’s hints at contemporary people and places, hidden within anagrams and numerological tricks. With the unraveling of these clues, which also include the use of actual Hasidic sources, the book is a valuable, contemporary view of historical reality. A meticulous reading of the book may therefore open a window on the hidden worlds of Hasidism and the Haskalah at the start of the nineteenth century.

The first volume (Imagined Hasidism) serves as an introduction to the complex satirical writings of Josef Perl of Tarnopol (1773-1839). At the center of the book stands an analysis of the satires, Megaleh Temirin (1819) and Bochen Tzadik (1838), including a systematic treatment of the ‘characters’ in the central works and a discussion of the dozens of manuscripts to be found in the Perl Archive in Jerusalem. Perl’s writings are analyzed here in the fuller context of Hebrew and Yiddish literature in general and Maskilic and Hasidic literature in particular, as well as other polemical writings and governmental records critical of Hasidism. The study thus presents a complex and nuanced picture of the relationship between literature and history, between the anti-Hasidic reports and the more complicated historical reality, and lays the groundwork for further research into the genre of nineteenth-century Maskilic satire.

The second and third volumes (Megaleh Temirin) present for the first time an annotated edition of Megaleh Temirin. It is based on the first edition and the scattered manuscripts and it includes a comparison to its Yiddish translation. The book is accompanied by appendices on its origins and contents, including fundamental treatments of several passages: an explication of the encoded names, the Hasidic sources used by the author, and the variants found in the manuscripts and in the only edition of the book in Yiddish.

The editor of the book, Professor Jonatan Meir, teaches in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University. He has published several articles on the Haskalah of Eastern Europe, Hasidism, and a number of varied topics in twentieth-century Kabbalah.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Contents


Introduction                                                                                     
Scholarship on the anti-Hasidic writings of Josef Perl • Hasidic hagiography and the emergence of satire • Two-fold reading of Perl’s writings and the gematriyot • Satire, literature, and history • ‘Holy Books’ and subversive books

Chapter 1: Josef Perl, Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov, and the ‘Holy Books’
Prayer of the fall of Hasidism and the expungement of their books • Sefer Shivhe ha-Besht and the critique of hagiography • Sefer Sipurey Ma‘asiyot and the parodic response to it • Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov, ‘heretical books’ and the ‘Holy Books’ • In praise of the true Tsaddikim • ‘Laughter of the heretics’: testimonies about the polemics against Sefer Shivhe ha-Besht • ‘Holy Books’, ‘sacredness of hagiography’, and parodies of hagiography • Appendix: Parodic manuscript about an opponent of the ‘Holy Books’ who was reborn as a horse

Chapter 2: Speaking Names in Sefer Megale Temirin                             
Time of the composition of Megale Temirin, censorship, and a note on the Buch • Hasidic books and the emergence of parody • Structure of Sefer Megale Temirin • The Introduction to Sefer Megale Temirin • Main Hasidic courts • The court in Żołyń (Łożne) and the peregrinations of the Buch • The court of Dishpal (Międzyboż), moneyboxes of the Besht, the holy relics • The court in Aklo (Olika) and the ritualized reading of Sefer Shivhe ha-Besht • Function of the footnotes and the parodic hagiography • History of the rabbis – clandestine opponents of Hasidism • The Besht in Tarnopol • Rabbi Meir Jacob of Zasław and the letters from Galicja  • Zaddikim in Galicja • Ciphered stories • ‘Holy Places’: reincarnations of a praise from Sefer Shivhe ha-Besht • The revelation of the Buch and the death of the secretary • ‘Gang of criminals’: another death and an escape to the Land of Israel • The End: Ovadia Ben Petahia and the rabbi of Opatów

Chapter 3: Joseph Perl, Hirsh of Zydaczów, and the Polemics of Gematriyot
Reb Zevi Hirsh of Zydaczów and Hasidism in Galicja • Maskilic opposition to the Zydaczówer • Letters concealed in Sefer Megale Temirin • A manuscript about the misdeeds of the Hasidim • Books, education, and a note on Reb Nathan of Nemirov • Zydaczówer’s ban on the Maskilim and the first Gematria • Parodic letter of Perl and the second Gematria • About the parodic letter and the jumble of gematriyot • Denunciation and expulsions of R Zevi Hirsh • ‘Father of impurity’: Joseph Perl and the writings of the rabbi of Komarno • Final note • Appendix: Parodic letter against the Zydaczówer

Chapter 4: Speaking Names in the Book of Sefer Bohen Zaddik               
The manuscript of Sefer Bohen Zaddik and the difficulties with its publication • Structure of the book • In search for the true Zaddik and the rabbi of Opatów • Travels of Ovadia Ben Petahia between the towns of Galicja • Kromcza Ruska (Zaleszczyki) or the entrance to Galicja • ‘Briks’ (Tarnopol): Rabbi Jehoshua Heschel Babad and the school • ‘Bicik’ (Lemberg) Rabbi Jacob Orenstein and a ban on the Maskilim • ‘Abdera’ (Brody) Rabbi Ephraim Zalman Margaliot and Sefer ha-Zoref • The explanation of the names of the rabbis • Utopia and dystopia • The hidden butcher and his kabbalistic writings • The discovery of the colonies • The image of the disciples of the Gaon and the ‘true Hasid’ • ‘The solution for the East’ or heterotopia •  The will to flee and the emissary

Chapter 5: The Imaginary Influence of Sefer Megale Temirin                     
The myth about the success of the book • Pamphlet Megale Sod • The manuscript about the misdeeds of the Hasidim • Dialogues about Sefer Megale Temirin • For whom Sefer Megale Temirin was intended and who read it • Note concerning Sefer Megale Temirin in Yiddish • Influence real and imagined • Was Sefer Shivhe ha-Besht written by a parodist? • Temerl Bergson and Sefer Megale Temirin • Writ of defense of Hasidism • Sefer Megale Temirin and the Hebrew literature • Appendix: writ of defense of Joseph Judah Lob Sossnitz

Afterword: Note on the Anti-Hasidic Outlook                                       

Bibliographic Abbreviations   

Reviews:
(1) Dan Meron, 2013, ‘Megaleh Temirin’, Kivunim Hadashim 29, 55 pages (Hebrew)
(2) David Assaf, 2014, ‘Hasidim will not Read it but Tear it’, Haaretz, Tarbut ve-Sifrut, p .6 (Hebrew) http://onegshabbat.blogspot.co.il/2014/04/blog-post_18.html
(3) Eliezer Brodt, 2014, 'New book Announcement- Megale Temirin', The Seforim Blog http://seforim.blogspot.co.il/2014/01/new-book-announcement-megale-temirin.html
(4) Matan Hermoni, 2014,  הסבתא המופקרת של הספרות העבריתHaaretz, Sfarim (Hebrew) http://www.haaretz.co.il/.premium-1.2382365
(5) Shinichi Yamamoto, 2015, 山本　伸一, "ヨナタン・メイール編著『想像のハシディズム』", ユダヤ・イスラエル研究　第28号  http://www.waseda.jp/assoc-jsjs/jistudies.html
(6) David Biale and David Assaf,, 2015, 'Revealer Revealed', Jewish Review of Books, pp. 17-21  http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1454/revealer-revealed/
(7) Hillel Halkin, 2015, "Sex, Magic, Bigotry, Corruption- and the First Hebrew Novel', Mosaic Magazine,  http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/05/sex-magic-bigotry-corruption-and-the-first-hebrew-novel/
(8) Tomer Persico, 2015, "Interview", Lula'at haEl http://tomerpersico.com/2015/08/10/meir_perl/
(9) Ariel Evan Mayse, 'Review', Jewish History (2015)ת  http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10835-015-9245-2
(10) Review - Gal-Ed

This article examines muzhiming, primarily excavated, written between 760 and 846 that were composed on commission, i.e., at the explicit behest of another party. I argue that in commissioning muzhiming, clients wished to do more than merely create a record of the deceased or identify the tomb occupant in perpetuity; they sought in addition to titivate the posthumous reputation of the deceased as well as enhance the reputations of family and friends among the broader audience for these texts. Moreover, because commissioned texts were often regarded with skepticism, writers of commissioned muzhiming employed a variety of rhetorical tactics within their compositions—quoted speech, final words, and the careful framing of the circumstances under which they were commissioned—in attempting to convince audiences of the reliability of their accounts. Finally, I explore why, other than for compensation, writers may have been willing to compose muzhiming on commission. My contention is that writers used these texts to enhance their own reputations as writers, or, less commonly, to make broader arguments illustrated or exemplified by their account of the life of the deceased.

(Feb 2019) El Mercader de Venecia, magna obra literaria redactada por el célebre escritor inglés William Shakespeare, aborda en una multiplicidad de temas. Algunas personas han llegado a considerar que esta obra es una apología del antisemitismo. Sin embargo, el crítico literario Frank Kermode sugiere que “Shakespeare pensó primero en la usura y después en los judíos, que tradicionalmente la practicaban”. Aquí, se intenta desentrañar la curiosa relación del catolicismo y del judaísmo con respecto a la práctica usuraria.

Véase el quinto ensayo de _DE REYES A LOBOS_: El autor sostiene que _Don Quijote_ de Cervantes puede leerse en clave económica, y que contiene lecciones sobre la importancia de la libertad política y monetaria. A través de un análisis pormenorizado de distintos episodios de la obra, el artículo presenta el modo en que aparecen conceptos como la Ley de Gresham, la inflación, la teoría subjetiva del valor, el control de precios y la usura. La obra cervantina comparte la misma visión económica de la Escuela de Salamanca, y en última instancia este trabajo demuestra que _Don Quijote_ busca mover a la reflexión sobre los problemas que ocasionan las prácticas económicas que se dirigen en contra de la libertad individual.

Disponible en Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0831S3NBC/.

George R.R. Martin's fantasy epic A Song of Ice and Fire brilliantly illustrates a number of basic principles of political economy. In particular, the richness of his world allows for a detailed account of economic and political relations in human society, and the saga uses its fantasy setting to dramatize and explore important questions about power, conflict, and the state. This essay discusses three economic themes in A Song of Ice and Fire. First, Martin's novels illustrate some fundamental ideas about political institutions, showing that organized economic exploitation is the foundation of the state. Second, they dramatize the relationship between war-making and public finance, describing the immense (networks of) political power created through control of the treasury, as well as the political logic that drives Lord Baelish and the Lannisters from taxation to borrowing to inflation in order to sustain and conceal the crown's war debt. Third, we examine how the rheto...

Hotel Modernity explores the impact of corporate space on the construction and texture of modern fiction and film. It centres the hotel and corporate space as key sites of modern experience and culture. Examining architectural and financial records, hotel trade journals, travel journalism, advertisements and cinematic and literary representations, it charts the rise of hotel culture from 1870 to 1939. From Henry James to Elizabeth Bowen and Charlie Chaplin, from the ecstatic Waldorf to the ephemeral Ritz, from upstate New York to the Italian Riviera, the book considers the effects of hotel space on bodies, selves and communities.

Italiano
Il presente saggio passa in rassegna una serie di commedie, drammi e satire composte in Inghilterra nel tardo periodo elisabettiano con lo scopo di mostrare come l’affermazione di temi economici sulle scene dei teatri londinesi abbia incoraggiato negli autori un progressivo allontanamento dalle forme di rappresentazione allegoriche per fare posto a forme più realistiche. Per la prima volta nella storia del teatro moderno, dinamiche commerciali e prettamente urbane finiscono al centro di una pièce di teatro imperniando il motore dell’azione scenica su elementi economici, come il credito, il lavoro, la mobilità sociale, le imprese commerciali. Il saggio mostra inoltre come il teatro tardo-elisabettiano si sia avvicinato a svolgere la funzione di forum di idee, dove i problemi della vita quotidiana dei londinesi potevano essere discussi e offerti al giudizio del pubblico. Dopo una ricostruzione sommaria del contesto culturale dell’epoca, il saggio si sofferma sulle money plays, le city comedies, la figura dell’usuraio elisabettiano, e la retorica del “dio denaro”.

English
This essay reviews a series of plays, comedies and satires from the late Elizabethan period. Its purpose is to show that the gradual appearance of economic themes in the dramatic literature of the time coincided with a shift away from allegorical forms and the rise of more realistic modes of representation. For the first time in the history of modern theater, trade and other typically urban dynamics took center stage in a show, making economic subjects such as credit, labor, social mobility, and commercial enterprises the driving force of the dramatic action. The essay also brings support to the widespread belief that late-Elizabethan theater came close to operating as a forum of ideas, a place where issues of daily life could be presented in the form of a show and left to the judgment of the audience. After a brief sketch of the cultural context of the time, the essay dwells on the topics of the money plays, the city comedies, the Elizabethan usurer, and the rhetoric of money as a “visible god”.

Abstract: This essay surveys and assesses the roles of asses in _Don Quijote de la Mancha_. I argue that their ultimate significance derives from the picaresque tradition, specifically Apuleius’s _The Golden Ass_ and the anonymous _Lazarillo de Tormes_. Cervantes deploys picaresque asses as symbolic markers of: 1) his own aesthetic prowess, 2) his criticism of racial and ethnic intolerance, 3) his vision of compensated labor and economic exchange as the proper means of avoiding social conflict among Old Christians, conversos, and Moriscos. As opposed to the light and casual school of interpretation represented by critics like Auerbach, Spitzer, and Russell, I approach Cervantes’s great novel as a very serious satire against the ethnocentric, orthodox, and appropriative tendencies of early modern Spain.


Resumen: En este ensayo examino la función de los asnos en _Don Quijote de la Mancha_. Sostengo que su significado se deriva de la tradición de la novela picaresca, específicamente _El asno de oro_ de Apuleyo y _El Lazarillo de Tormes_ de autor anónimo. Cervantes despliega asnos picarescos como marcadores simbólicos de: 1) su propia destreza estética, 2) su crítica de la intolerancia étnica y racial, 3) su visión del trabajo compensado y el intercambio económico como los medios adecuados para evitar el conflicto social entre cristianos viejos, conversos y moriscos. A diferencia de la escuela de interpretación ligera representada por críticos como Auerbach, Spitzer y Russell, yo leo la gran novela de Cervantes como una grave sátira contra las tendencias racistas, ortodoxas y despojativas de la España de la temprana edad moderna.

Keywords: Don Quijote, Dulcinea, Cervantes, Apuleius, Mendoza, The Golden Ass, Lazarillo de Tormes, ass, mule, donkey, picaresque novel, history of the novel, comparative literature, satire, metalepsis, miscegenation, racism, orthodoxy, commerce, economics, Auerbach, mimesis, Inquisition, Moriscos, conversos, Old Christians, Neoplatonism, School of Salamanca, Juan de Mariana, Bartolomé de las Casas, El Greco, Velázquez.

Palabras clave: Don Quijote, Dulcinea, Cervantes, Apuleyo, Mendoza, Asno de oro, Lazarillo de Tormes, asno, burro, mula, novela picaresca, historia de la novela, literatura comparada, sátira, metalepsis, mestizaje, racismo, ortodoxia, comercio, economía, Auerbach, mímesis, Inquisición, moriscos, conversos, cristianos viejos, neoplatonismo, Escuela de Salamanca, Juan de Mariana, Bartolomé de las Casas, El Greco, Velásquez.

This volume on the relationships between decadent literature and anthropology in late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe studies the unnoticed connection between, on the one hand, a purposeless and ephemeral beauty, and, on the other hand, the disinterestedness and the spontaneity ascribed by anthropologists to the ceremonial expenditure of “primitive” civilizations. The book highlights how, in those two apparently opposed discourses, prodigality and uselessness challenge the Western cult of profit by working in two directions: beauty is a form of lavishness, and lavishness is a source of beauty. An innovative theoretical and cultural framework at the crossroads of aesthetics, anthropology, and philosophy allows me to reexamine the works of O. Wilde, G. D’Annunzio, and J.-K. Huysmans, and to claim the crucial role of neglected authors like Paolo Mantegazza and Vernon Lee in what I trace as the emergence of a proto-theorization of gift-exchange in the European fin de siècle culture. The pervasiveness of symbolic economy in those writers establishes a new dynamic relationship between decadence and modernism, and also exposes the limits of the allegedly disinterested forms of expenditure that will soon lure the modernists to go “primitive”.

In 1719 Charles VI made Trieste a free port within the Habsburg Empire. Hence the city enjoyed a nearly miraculous growth, becoming a vital trade hub. 18 th century Trieste was a prosperous trading city and melting pot of people and cultures, thus the best place for the circulation not only of material good, but also of less tangible ones, such as ideas and poems. Studying the activity of local literary academies (the Arcadia Romano-Sonziaca and the Società di Minerva), the flourishing multilingual publishing industry and the press (chiefly the «Osservatore triestino»), I reconstructed the 'Trieste Poetic Network', namely the extensive cultural network which united Trieste to cities all over Europe. Poetic texts, in fact, circulated to and from Trieste in many different directions. The study, based on more than 1.500 poems, highlighted a few interesting facts. Firstly, the multilingual character of the Triestine literary production, which counts texts written in Italian, French, Hebrew, German, Latin, Ancient Greek, Slovenian and Venetian dialect. Secondly, the importance of French influence over Triestine authors, despite their staunch loyalty to the Habsburg Empire. Thirdly, the political commitment of many texts, which were published throughout the Empire, in order to spread politically-oriented messages. The analysis of the Triestine poetic corpus unveiled the centrality of Trieste in the 18 th century European cultural panorama. It underlined also the importance of poetry itself as political and communicative media. Especially during the Napoleonic wars, in fact, the circulation of poems became an actual 'Battle of Ideas', which opposed Napoleon's supporters to Habsburg' loyalists. Both for the abundance of unedited archival documentation and for its character of 'marginal land', 18 th century Trieste represents an intriguing case study from which it is possible to reconstruct the parallelism between merchant and cultural roads, and also the interconnections between politics, economics and poetry.

Pound stated in interview with Donald Hall that ‘Thrones concerns the states of mind of people responsible for something more than their personal conduct.’ Pound compares his project with Dante’s Paradiso, where the Florentine’s thrones ‘are for the spirits of the people who have been responsible for good government,’ whilst Pound’s thrones ‘are an attempt to move out from egoism and to establish some definition of an order possible or at any rate conceivable on earth.’ From the opening canto, Thrones takes Byzantium as one of its thematic focal points in the transition from the classical to the early medieval epoch. Pound draws on Alexander Del Mar’s History of Monetary Systems (1895) and the Book of the Eparch of Leo the Wise, a late-ninth or early-tenth century text concerning the rules of commerce between guilds in Byzantium, rediscovered and translated by the Genevan Jules Nicole in 1891. Matters of currency and its implications for political power occupy the centre of the discourse on statecraft and responsible rule in the early medieval Mediterranean. The strengths of Byzantine rule are on display in its legal system, monetary policy, and in the supreme aesthetic achievement of the mosaics in Ravenna. The visage of Justinian the Great, Byzantine Emperor between 527 and 565 and the first emperor to appear on coinage bearing the Christian cross, as well as that of his consort Theodora, grace the apse of the Basilica di San Vitale. His rule was distinctive for his codification of Roman law in the Corpus Juris Civilis and the construction of the Hagia Sophia in Byzantium, a neat rhyme with Abd al-Malik’s construction of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem a century later. These intersections of law, civil administration and treasury serve as prime exemplars for Pound in Thrones, alongside other examples such as the Sacred Edict of Confucian conduct composed by the fourth Qing emperor Kangxi in the seventeenth century, and the Institutions of the Laws of England by Edward Coke, a leading Elizabethan-Jacobean Attorney General and Chief Justice. Notions of just commerce and transparency in the establishment of monetary value are embedded in, and reflecting in the high aesthetic achievements of these different cultural spheres. Byzantium, in this sense, is a kind of blueprint for successful statecraft and economic policy Pound attempts to identify in a range of historical moments leading to his contemporary support for the policies of Social Credit.

Economic themes have recently become a conspicuous feature of the Italian novel. Many of these works contrast the present economic order with that of a mostly idealized past. This paper contains a close reading of a selection of such novels analyzed from an economic perspective. It seeks to explain how the authors' criticism of today's economy and the moral stance their stories project relate to a particular interpretation of economic mechanisms. The novels included in the analysis are the following: Come ho perso la guerra, by Filippo Bologna; Dove eravate tutti, by Paolo Di Paolo; La caduta, by Giovanni Cocco; La fine del mondo storto, by Mauro Corona. The study is part of a larger project on the literary representations of contemporary economic issues. The paper is in Italian.

This book reveals the economic motivations underpinning colonial, neocolonial and neoliberal eras of global capitalism that are represented in critiques of inequality in postcolonial fiction. Today’s economic inequality, suffered disproportionately by indigenous and minority groups of postcolonial societies in both developed and developing countries, is a direct outcome of the colonial-era imposition of capitalist structures and practices. The longue durée, world-systems approach in this study reveals repeating patterns and trends in the mechanics of capitalism that create and maintain inequality. Narratives of Inequality reveals the social and cultural beliefs and practices that justify and support inequality, yet equally which resist and condemn it.
Through analysis of narrative representations of wealth accumulation and ownership, structures of internal inequality between the rich and the poor within cultural communities, and the psychology of capitalism that engenders particular emotions and behaviour, this study brings postcolonial literary economics to the neoliberal debate, arguing for the important contribution of the imaginary to the pressing issue of economic inequality and its solutions.

Lessing und die Ökonomie – das ist sicher eine interessante Perspektive, wird man doch normalerweise nicht allzu viel Aufmerksamkeit darauf wen-den. 1 Nun weiß jeder, der sich irgend mit Lessing beschäftigt, daß es um seine Finanzen oft nicht zum Besten bestellt war. Die Notwendigkeit, seine Privatbibliothek zu auktionieren, um die angehäuften Schulden bezahlen zu können, ist ein bekanntes Detail der Biographie Lessings, ebenso die fatale Spielsucht (S. 53-54). Wie aber wird Ökonomisches in seinen dramati-schen Werken, um die es hier geht, sichtbar? Die vorliegenden Arbeit, 2 eine umfangreiche Bielefelder Dissertation, die von Wolfgang Braungart betreut wurde, geht so vor, daß nach einer Be-trachtung des Begriffs der Ökonomie von der antiken Haushaltslehre Xe-nophons an bis zur Ökonomik des 18. Jahrhunderts und zur Vorstellung ei-nes homo oeconomicus in einem konzisen Kapitel über Lessing und die Ökonomie gehandelt wird. Hier wird auf die Rolle des Geldes im Drama sei-ner Zeit verwiesen, das im Gegensatz zur Arbeit häufig erwähnt wird (S. 49-50). Daß Ökonomie nicht unbedingt im Zentrum des Werkes von Lessing steht, gilt auch sonst für viele Dramen seiner Zeit, denn in ihnen kommt ein wichtiger ökonomischer Bereich, die Arbeit, gar nicht vor (S. 49). Wenn etwa Novalis Lessing als ökonomischen Autor bezeichnet, so hat das mit der wirtschaftsbezogenen Begriffsverwendung nichts zu tun (ebd.). Die Sich-tung dessen, was Lessing über Ökonomie nun im Sinne einer Wirtschafts

"In the exquisite banality of his existence in the industrial metropolis of early-twentieth-century Dublin, Leopold Bloom's closest brush with his own mortality over the course
of his eponymous day occurs when he is nearly struck down by a street-sweeping tram while crossing the road on his way into Nighttown, shortly after midnight..."

George R.R. Martin's fantasy epic A Song of Ice and Fire brilliantly illustrates a number of basic principles of political economy. In particular, the richness of his world allows for a detailed account of economic and political relations in human society, and the saga uses its fantasy setting to dramatize and explore important questions about power, conflict, and the state. This essay discusses three economic themes in A Song of Ice and Fire. First, Martin's novels illustrate some fundamental ideas about political institutions, showing that organized economic exploitation is the foundation of the state. Second, they dramatize the relationship between war-making and public finance, describing the immense (networks of) political power created through control of the treasury, as well as the political logic that drives Lord Baelish and the Lannisters from taxation to borrowing to inflation in order to sustain and conceal the crown's war debt. Third, we examine how the rhetoric of Westeros's ruling class prevents the emergence of institutions friendly to peace and social cooperation, especially in the form of market exchange.

In light of (re)new(ed), interdisciplinary interest in the history of capitalism—a focus captured in Edward E. Baptist’s recent book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014)—this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-Atlantic modernity. Scholarship on the novel has already established the rich ways of reading A Mercy as a rememory of colonial North America, and the novel has been reviewed within the context of its historical moment of publication (the 2008 Housing Crisis and the election of Barack Obama), but there have been few analytical readings of the novel within its moment of publication. Therefore, my essay seeks to open more space for thinking about the novel in multiple temporal directions. Drawing on a theoretical and historical framework shaped by Hortense Spillers, Jacques Derrida, Joseph Roach, Ian Baucom, and Suzan-Lori Parks, I argue that A Mercy is a text that teaches us how to better read narratives of the Housing Crisis, which coincidentally erupted in the same year as its publication. I demonstrate this through a careful reading of the text’s narrative economy as it is shaped by the historical economic logic of the moment that it recounts, attending both to close readings of the novel’s language and analysis of its narrative structure. Ultimately, the essay continues discussions of Morrison’s novel by insisting on its centrality in conversations about the history of our most recent economic crisis.

This chapter presents an analysis of four contemporary Italian novels that revolve around the theme of the contrast between past and present. The novels in question are: Dove eravate tutti, by Paolo Di Paolo (2011); Storia della mia gente, by Edoardo Nesi (2010); Riportando tutto a casa, by Nicola Lagioia (2009) and La fine del mondo storto by Mauro Corona (2010). The essay shows that the representation of reality found in these novels does not live up to the expectations generated by the tradition of literary realism and concludes that their success is essentially based on the popularity of their authors in the media and, in particular, on their identity as public intellectuals. Paper in French.

Il s'agit d'une relecture - inspirée de la philosophie de Simone de Beauvoir - du livre de Thomas Piketty *Le Capital au XXIe siècle*. Piketty traite des inégalités face au capital, en oubliant les inégalités patrimoniales entre les femmes et les hommes. Or, cet économiste montre que le capital et l'héritage se sont effondrés au XXe siècle, et je remarque que cette période correspond à l'essor de l'égalité des sexes. Simple coïncidence ? Maintenant que capital et héritage reprennent de la vigueur, qu'adviendra-t-il de l'égalité des sexes ? On a traditionnellement lié "égalité sociale" et "égalité des sexes", faisant dépendre la seconde de la première. Le simple fait de poser la question du lien entre le retour de l'héritage et l'avenir de l'égalité des sexes laisse ouverte une possibilité : celle que l’égalité entre les femmes et les hommes ne soit pas subordonnée à la réalisation de l’égalité sociale ; c’est même pouvoir imaginer une primauté de l’égalité des sexes, fondée sur un héritage féministe victorieux, qui influerait sur la répartition des richesses.