Deficits and Desires: Economics and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century LiteratureThis book examines the effects on literary works of a little-noted economic development in the early twentieth century: individuals and governments alike began to regard going into debt as a normal and even valuable part of life. The author also shows, surprisingly, that the economic changes normalizing debt paralleled and intersected with changes in sexual discourse. In Victorian novels, sex and debt are considered dangerous activities that the young should avoid in order to save and invest toward eventual marriage and a home. In twentieth-century texts, however, it often seems acceptable to go into debt and engage in sex before marriage. These literary representations followed social transformations as both economic and sexual discourse moved from the logic of saving and production to the logic of circulation. In Keynesian economics and consumerism, governments and individuals were actually encouraged to borrow and to spend more in order to increase demand and keep money circulating. In twentieth-century sexual treatises, people were similarly encouraged to indulge their desires, as pent-up states were considered as deleterious to the physical body as they were to the economic. In this book, the author traces these social transformations by examining twentieth-century literary works and films that are structured around contrasts between repressive and expansive forms of economics and sexuality. He studies a range of authors, including James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Zora Neale Hurston, and Frank Capra. The book ends with the 1960s, because after that decade deficits no longer seemed the cure for anything, and the advocacy of sexual indulgence dwindled. For half a century, however, the intersections of sexual and economic discourses created a sense that society was on the verge of a vast transformation. The artists studied in this book were fascinated by such a prospect, but remained ambivalent, as it seemed that their dreams of escaping dull bourgeois life and ending repression were becoming true because of the influence of the crassest economic policies. |
From inside the book
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... presents the history of that shift in rather different terms . By demonstrating a remarkable relationship between the margi- nalist economists and the early developers of sexual science , such as Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud ...
... present , but they pay no attention to the details of the next economic " revolution " — the Keynesian one — which carried much further the valuing and chan- neling of desire , developing macroeconomic strategies for stimulating and ...
... present which underlay his hostility to saving and thus helped him identify ' over - saving ' as the cause of the Depression . " Even within economics changes occur in disparate parts of the econ- omy for quite different reasons , so ...
... presents shopping as the main ac- tivity of its characters . Consumerism also entwines itself with aesthetic works far removed from modernism : numerous films in the early twentieth century , such as Heaven Can Wait and It Happened One ...
... present extended passages from Foucault and Birken in these first two chapters to provide contexts for the rest of my book , but it should be noted that these historians disagree about as much as the nov- elists do : Foucault's talk of ...
Contents
1 | |
The Freedom to Borrow in Ulysses | 19 |
The Financier 46 | 46 |
The Great Gatsby | 72 |
The National Cures of Ezra Pound | 121 |
Their Eyes | 173 |
Normalizing Debt in the Movies | 197 |
Notes | 217 |
Index | 235 |
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Deficits and Desires: Economics and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Literature Michael Tratner No preview available - 2002 |