Finance Fictions ― Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis

Building on both established and emerging discussions of literature and finance, Finance Fictions takes the measure of the tension between psychosis and realism in the contemporary finance novel. Revisiting such twentieth-century classics of the genre as Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, this book considers that the twenty-first century is witnessing the birth of a new kind of finance novel that in the face of an ongoing economic crisis, ever more frequent market crashes, and the politics of austerity, pursues a more realist approach to the actual workings of the economy.

But what kind of realism would be attuned to today’s economic reality of high-frequency trading, dominated by complex financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, and digital algorithms operating at speeds faster than what human beings or computers can record? If Tom Wolfe in 1989 could still urge novelists to work harder to “tame the billion-footed beast of reality”, it seems today’s economic reality confronts us with a difference that is qualitative rather than quantitative: a new financial ontology requiring new modes of thinking and writing.

Mobilizing the philosophical thought of Quentin Meillassoux in the close-reading of finance novels by Robert Harris, Michel Houellebecq, Ben Lerner and less well-known works of conceptual writing such as Mathew Timmons’ Credit, Finance Fictions argues that realism is in for a speculative update if it wants to take on the contemporary economy—an “if” whose implications turn out to be deeply political. Part literary study and part philosophical inquiry, Finance Fictions seeks to contribute to a new mindset for creative and critical work on finance in the twenty-first century.