What do we talk about when we talk about finance? Assistant Professor of English Michelle Chihara, whose areas of research include real estate, financial panics, and contemporary culture, recently authored a long piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books that examines two books: Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s and Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form.
According to Chihara, these two books stand as good examples of how we should be trying to understand finance, both because finance itself is deeply entangled with narrative and realism, and because the staggering rise of financiers as a class demands that we interrogate their cultural authority. In addition, both books were written by women in the humanities: Leigh Claire La Berge and Anna Kornbluh.
Read more on Chihara's review.
