Economies of Scale

This book offers the first sustained study of the ways 21st 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.

Extends research on contemporary poetry and economics to examine twenty-first century North American poetry Examines the socio-political underpinnings of contemporary cultural production Draws on economics, sociology, anthropology, political theory, postcolonial studies and more

Autorentext
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.

Klappentext

This book offers the first sustained study of the ways 21st 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.

Inhalt
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.