FFAC10101 - Literature and the Financial Crisis of 2008

Course Description

In this course we will look at 2008 stock market crash as an event within literary fiction among writers in the US, the UK, and South Asia.Our goal will be to understand the challenges that representing the 2008 crisis posed to novelists; to try to understand the social and ideological location of literature in relation to that crisis; and more generally to try to understand neoliberalism as a theory and a politics.

Course Outline

Readings:

• David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005)
• A selection of critical and historical essays, including “Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Rancière, and the Form of the Photograph” (2011) by Walter Benn Michaels
• Adiga’s The White Tiger
• Kudos (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018) by Rachel Cusk
• Capital (W. W. Norton, 2012) by John Lanchester
• 10:04 (Faber and Faber, 2014) by Ben Lerner.
• In addition to watching The Big Short, students will be asked to listen to a 2008 episode of This American Life dedicated to the financial crisis, “The Giant Pool of Money,” which was co-reported by Adam Davidson, AB’92.