Commentary: Economics and American Literary Studies in the New Gilded Age

Abstract

The marginalization of the humanities, while depressing, has at least provoked literary scholars into rethinking what they do and foregrounding the relevance of their research. The spike of interest in the economic humanities illustrates one path for making literary study more legible. To that end, several trends emerge in recent economic-themed literary scholarship. One trend of establishing the salience of humanistic scholarship proceeds by locating the origins of present concerns, such as the corporate takeover of democracy, in the past. While that approach is exciting and engaging, care must be taken not to flatten out differences between historical periods. A second salutary trend of making the humanities more intelligible develops interventionist and activist modes of scholarship—for instance, in the interest of making the economy more equitable, and by suggesting alternatives to current impasses. Through such approaches, the economic humanities can help demystify the epistemology of capitalism, the mental barrier determining what is and is not thinkable.