Commentary

The recent economic crisis reminds us that economic dislocation—the shearing of jobs, the epidemic of home foreclosures, the collapse of stock prices, the pervasive economic insecurity—shapes virtually every aspect of our public and private lives. Economic downturns influence everything from how we vote to where we live to whom we trust. Crises rupture our social communities and expose how conditions beyond our control—banking practices here and abroad, the grinding efficiencies of regional and global labor markets, the financial risk-taking of friends and friends of friends—constrain our capacity to act in and on the world. Crises depress, outrage, confuse, fascinate, and mobilize us. They bring us together in suffering, survivorship, and protest, but they also reveal how various forms of being and belonging—our class, gender, race, age, and so on—make us economically vulnerable in starkly different ways. If crises are incitements to new kinds and intensities of affect—panic, sympathy, despair, awe—they are also engines of enlightenment. Upending neoliberal shibboleths about ownership, upward mobility, and the communal benefits of individual profit-seeking, economic upheaval prompts us to question basic principles of government, economy, and social behavior: What role should government play in the economy’s management? Is devastation the most or least normal feature of American capitalism? Do we owe aid and encouragement to financial victims?

Given how widely economic dislocation ramifies across society, and given the profundity of the cultural, political, moral, and metaphysical questions economic crisis brings sensationally into focus, it should come as no surprise that economic panics and depressions have preoccupied American fiction writers, dramatists, poets, autobiographers, and essayists since at least the American Revolution. Economic crises have fueled new literary movements and genres; transformed book and magazine markets, consolidating new readerships and wrenching the economics of literary production; and provoked important kinds of literary innovation. As a number of scholars have recently shown, crises have also served as a fertile thematic and formal resource for imaginative writers, providing a rich field site for studying, scripting, and staging the social meanings of business failure and social collapse.

The three essays devoted to literature and economic crisis in this issue advance this recent scholarship and suggest new directions it might take. Since Cecelia Tichi’s “Canonizing Economic Crisis” offers a summons to which the other two essays in different ways respond, I’ll begin with it. Her essay urges us to give attention to the economic content and contexts of the literature we study and teach. She calls for us to do this with works and bodies of literature that have escaped this kind of analysis, either because earlier generations of critics have viewed them with different critical and political values in mind, framing how we view this literature today, or because these works are too new to have been viewed as a historically coherent archive. Tichi calls not for a new kind of economic criticism but rather for a renewed commitment to studying how literature exposes and studies the social problems attending economic turmoil and transformation.

Tichi asks us to see the current economic crisis as a “wake-up call” for such a critical turn. More conscious than ever of the ramifying social damage caused by economic upheaval, we have ample motivation to analyze the ways economic dislocation, including the longer-term transformations culminating in the current crisis, informs and inflects literary texts; we also have ample motivation, perhaps even a moral imperative, to analyze the ways literary texts illuminate the social meanings and effects of these transformations. In addition, according to Tichi, we have ample reason to privilege this kind of analysis and make “economics”—shorthand for the social dimensions of macroeconomic arrangements and experience—a major critical keyword directing our research and teaching, just as scholarship emerging out of the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s did with “race,” “ethnicity,” and “gender.” Tichi thus calls for a renewed emphasis on economics as a socially and politically relevant—indeed, urgent and consequential—field around which to convene and perhaps transform our work as literary scholars.

What, precisely, do we gain by this economic turn? For starters, attention to...