Fictions of Finance at the End of an American Century

Punctuating Capital represents a vital intervention in debates about literatureâs critical purchase on contemporary financialisaton...By drawing out the connections between Marxâs dialectical theory of production and Bakhtinâs dialogic theory of language the work apprehends the âmaterial record of the interrupted rhythmsâ of productive labour in the very structures of the sentence itself. Written in Goddenâs inimitably sophisticated but engaging style the work offers us a new and necessary historical arc for understanding fictionâs apprehension of late twentieth century economic crises. A painstakingly elegant parsing of writers, including Brett Easton Ellis, Jayne Anne Phillips and David Foster Wallace, reinforces the political power of close critique. * Nicky Marsh, University of Southampton * The abstractions of capital materialise themselves, like the movements of God, in mysterious ways. The demand that we attend to this process - to the elusive means by which 'the residues of production are retained within their evanescence' â is one of the most pressing challenges facing critical thinking today. In Punctuating Capital Richard Godden extends his peerless work on literature and economics to give the fullest and closest account we have of the capacity for literary language to register the continuing contradictions of contemporary capitalism. There is no other critic writing today who is able to show, with such force and precision, how the close reading of literary texts can reveal the material conditions of cultural life. * Peter Boxall, University of Sussex * Punctuating Capital emerges like Athena from the godhead, or Daenerys from the flames, to stand as the premier account today of how language scores and is abbreviated by capital. In this dazzling account of fiction's registration of fictitious capital's exfoliation of responsibility for its persistent exploitation in the capitalist world-system, Punctuating Capital does more than remind readers about the requisite centrality of materialist approaches, like those of Volosinov, Bakhtin, and Lukács, to literary studies. Its acuity joins them at the summit. The readings carefully illuminate how capital's jerks and spasms rip society apart, even as it seeks to obscure this damage full stop. Newly classic. * Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick *