Inflationary Modernisms: Modernism and Money

This seminar is a hybrid event, available to join in person or online via Zoom. 

Rob Hawkes (Teeside University), "Impressionist Accounting: The Great Gatsby, Inflation, and the Public Money Paradigm"

Abstract: 

This paper offers a fresh interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and its complex attitudes to money, gender, race, and sexuality in relation to the concept of ‘inflation’. Taking up the question of inflation from the perspective of the ‘public money paradigm’ advanced by the Money on the Left Editorial Collective (moneyontheleft.org), it rejects the orthodox understanding of money as a medium of private exchange in favour of an affirmation of money’s irreducible publicness. ‘Inflation’ has been associated, by modernist artists and scholars alike, with a crisis of faith in representation, with exuberance and excess, and with the relativisation and loss of all value. By contrast, this paper reframes Gatsby’s preoccupation with temporal and spatial dislocation and its challenges to heteronormative white supremacist patriarchy as vital components of its method of ‘Impressionist accounting’. Thus, Fitzgerald’s novel exhibits a commitment to social inclusion that runs counter to reactionary anxieties about the inflationary dangers associated with ‘new money’.

Bio:

Rob Hawkes is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University. He is author of Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Past Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS), and a member of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective (moneyontheleft.org). He is currently completing his second monograph: Literature, Money, and Trust, 1890-1990: Monetary Modernisms.

Kieran Brown: "Mark of Shame: On the Surface of the Weimar Hyperinflation.”

Abstract:

This paper examines the strange intersection between shame and inflation that crops up so often in writings on the Weimar Hyperinflation. Using some untranslated (Über die Scham, 1919/1920) and lesser-known works (“A Descriptive Analysis of the German Decline,” 1921) by Walter Benjamin, it tries to develop a new ontology of shame during modern hyperinflationary events. Unsatisfied with conventional readings of this relation, which often see shame as a psychological consequence of overidentifying with currency, this paper is rather interested in how a link, or a means of exchange, between mind and money is possible in the first place. If shame deprives one of an interior, then for Benjamin it is structured very much like inflation (where bank notes take leave of value). The relation is not one of a pre-existing mind that comes to see itself in money, in other words, but one in which capital produces (and nullifies) the interior life of its subjects. But there is also another side to this relation. For Benjamin hints at inflation’s “messianic” possibilities; how might shame, in a similar fashion, form the basis of a new political solidarity?

Bio: 

Kieran Brown just completed his DPhil in English at the University of Oxford. His work focusses primarily on literature, economy and critical theory in the modernist period. He has a forthcoming edited collection, Inflationary Modernities, that compiles various perspectives on the culture and literary consequences of inflation since 1789.

Unless stated otherwise, all our events are free of charge and anyone interested in the topic is welcome to attend. Registration is required for all events.