Economies of Scale: Financialization and Contemporary North American Poetry

by Ann Keniston

Overview

This book offers the first sustained study of the ways 21^st century North American poems engage with financialization. It argues that recent poems about economics not only discuss but enact concerns with containment and agency essential to the contemporary financialized economy by manipulating the seemingly old-fashioned figures of synecdoche (the representation of the whole by the part) and prosopopeia or personification. Its four body chapters offer in-depth readings of the work of eleven formally, culturally, and thematically diverse contemporary U.S. and Canadian poets who variously consider labor, consumerism, debt, and the derivative form; the Coda reads several recent poems about reparations in terms of an emerging tendency to emphasize the historical, racialized, and ethical contexts of contemporary economics. As the book explores financialization’s representation in recent poetry, it redresses arguments that poetry is irrelevant to contemporary culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783031393402
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	12/16/2023
Series:	Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics
Edition description:	1st ed. 2023
Pages:	143
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Ann Keniston is the author of two monographs, including the Brooks-Warren Award-winning Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry (2015), and coeditor of multiple volumes considering post-9/11 and politically engaged literature. Also a poet, Ann is a Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA.

Table of Contents

Introduction : Economies of Scale: Financialization and Contemporary North American Poetry.- Chapter One: “[A] fictive person / around whom the air is blurred with money”: Precarious Labor and the Work of Poetry.- Chapter Two: “Miss Thing”: Prosopopeia, Aliveness, and the Female Consumer.- Chapter Three: “[A]n arrangement of figures on an open field”: Death, Displacement, and Unrepayable Debts.- Chapter Four: “Were you afraid // your book would vanish”: Gambling on the Print Book in the Electronic Age.- Chapter 5 : Coda: “[T]hese gestures of redress sailed to me!”: U.S. Poetry after 2016.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"With its lucid, compelling approach to the figures and forms of the economic present, Economies of Scale: Financialization and Contemporary North American Poetry offers an essential account of contemporary poetry’s reflections on the logics of financialization. Through a series of deft readings of the work of key recent North American poets, Ann Keniston makes an essential case for poetry as a medium particularly suited for reflecting on capitalism’s abstract strategies and material realities." (Margaret Ronda, Associate Professor of English, University of California-Davis)