Economies of Scale: Financialization and Contemporary North American Poetry (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics)

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. Acknowledgments and Permissions Contents List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction: Economies of Scale: Financialization and Contemporary North American Poetry Chapter 2: “[A] fictive person / around whom the air is blurred with money”: Precarious Labor and the Work of Poetry Chapter 3: “Miss Thing”: Prosopopeia, Aliveness, and the Female Consumer Chapter 4: “[A]n arrangement of figures on an open field”: Death, Displacement, and Unrepayable Debts Chapter 5: “Were you afraid // your book would vanish”: Gambling on the Print Book in the Electronic Age Chapter 6: Coda: “[T]hese gestures of redress sailed to me!”: U.S. Poetry After 2016 Works Cited Index