2025/01/16 by Reichel, A. Elisabeth
#330 - Wirtschaft #800 - Literatur #810 - Englische Literatur Amerikas #Economic humanities #Literaturwissenschaft #Posthumanism #Rhetorik
paper · doi:10.48693/626
Christine Daigle and Russell Kilbourn (2021) open the inaugural issue of Interconnections/Interconnexions by urging contributors and readers to conceptualize beings and their relationships in new ways in light of our contemporary moment of coalescing socioeconomic, political, and environmental emergencies (4). In its contribution to this mission, this special issue starts from Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) observation that “the concept of the human has exploded under the double pressure of contemporary scientific advances and global economic concerns” (1) to inquire into the representations of the economic and “the non-human, the inhuman, the anti-human, the inhumane and the posthuman” that this rupture has produced (2). The contributorslocate the strains that have exploded the familiar Enlightenment creature not only in contemporary times but also reach back as far as to the Industrial Revolution to discover figures of the posthuman. Our issue submits that conceptions of the economic and the (post)human have long been enmeshed, interconnecting in ways that traverse and precede twentieth-centurydevelopments of automation and robotization, financialization, and neoliberalization.As such, the issue also contributes to a vibrant area of research that undergoes a phase of sedimentation at the moment. Scholarship located at the interface of literature, culture, and the economy has tended to flourish in anticyclical movements to economic growth and stability, with seminal writings appearing in the recessive 1980s and a wave of studies pouring out in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Late-twentieth-century research efforts culminated in the volume New Economic Criticism (Woodmansee and Osteen 1999) and gained significant impetus from the work of Jean-Joseph Goux and Marc Shell (Goux 1984; Shell 1982). They gave much argumentative weight to the homology between language and money as systems of signs that refer to each other rather than to any inherent value. The new outpour of economic criticism following the 2008 financial crisis has been regularly surveyed by Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight, and Nicky Marsh’s annual review essay on “Economic Criticism,” which noted in its inaugural installment the growing scholarly attention that the relations between literature, culture, and the economy have received in the wake of the crisis (Crosthwaite, Knight, and Marsh 2015, 108). In charting the field, Crosthwaite, Knight, and Marsh position current research against both Marxist criticism and New Economic Criticism, and observe a marked expansion of the former in scope and approach as well as major revisions or rejections of New Economic Criticism for its now-questionable components, including “a preference for homological argument,” “semiotic models of economic processes,” and “a certain depoliticization in style and approach” (109).