[Marxism] "Master of the Universe: Literature, Culture, and Finance Culture"

[Ruthless Critic of All that Exists]

-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick William Gallagher [mailto:pwg211 at nyu.edu]
Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 1:06 PM

To whom it may concern,

Greetings.  I am a graduate student in the Comp Lit department at NYU,
and I'm organizing a seminar at the ACLA conference at Harvard, March
26-29, 2009.  The topic is the relationship between culture and finance.


Many thanks,
Patrick

"Master of the Universe: Literature, Culture, and Finance Culture"

Seminar Organizer: Patrick Gallagher, NYU.  Abstracts due by NOVEMBER 3,
2008

After the recent collapse of the market in mortgage-based securities,
the outlook for the future of the global financial services industry is
uncertain. Yet at least for the moment, finance remains globalization's
universal language. In the last three decades, the role of finance in
reshaping national economies to facilitate their absorption into a
global economic system has been more dominant than that of any other
industry.

This seminar will explore how local cultures respond to and are formed
by the imperatives of an economically, socially, and politically
dominant financial services industry. The question of finance and its
cultural power has concerned numerous scholarly discourses, including
globalization, postcolonialism, and postmodernism. As Fredric Jameson,
David Harvey, Mary Poovey, Giovanni Arrighi, Saskia Sassen, Randy
Martin, and many others have shown, finance is a problem both of
representation and of aesthetics, a social phenomenon that has
influenced styles of cultural production as much as or more than it has
been explored and criticized by artists as a topic of thematic content.

This seminar welcomes papers on how literature represents and reflects
contemporary finance culture; the finance cultures of earlier eras, from
Renaissance Venice to Victorian London; cultural responses to financial
crises; the impact of finance culture on architecture and urban
planning, both in financial capitals and in former centers of
manufacturing; ways in which industries such as publishing, film, and
the art world have changed by incorporating financial models into their
own cultural production; and, potentially, numerous other topics in a
wide range of disciplines.

TO SUBMIT AN ABSTRACT: Contact pwg211 at nyu.edu or visit www.acla.org

DEADLINE: November 3, 2008