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

In the late 1990s, I published an article in the Journal of Economic Issues. When I proudly showed it to a colleague in the Economics department, he thumbed through and put me in my place with three words: "Where's the math?" Two decades later, humanists have reason to feel even more sidelined than I did by my numerically inclined colleague. The 2008 recession did not create, but certainly has exacerbated, both the belief that the purpose of college is to train students for jobs and the corporatization of the university. Moreover, there has been what a 2018 Association of Departments of English (ADE) report calls the "precipitous decline" in English majors; the drop from 2012 to 2016 alone is over 20% (ADE 1, 49). The Science Technology Engineering Mathematics fields call the shots at most universities, and beneath those exalted disciplines we find the labyrinthine pecking order that tracks tightly with economic resources, both in terms of grant dollars brought in to the university and faculty salaries paid out. While Engineering may rank above the Economics department, Economics towers over English.

Yet this marginalization of the humanities, while thoroughly depressing, has at least provoked us into rethinking what we do. Scholars today seem increasingly invested in making our work matter outside of our own echo chamber. Humanists are concerned as never before with establishing the relevance of our scholarship, and even if the move is reactive, the trend is still encouraging. The spike of interest in what one essay here calls the economic humanities (Crosthwaite et al.) illustrates one path to making literary study more widely legible. The essays collected in this special issue address an expansive array of subjects, from Poor Richard to Beyoncé, from financial advice literature to racial capitalism. Here I will look at two trends that emerge across the group, both of which I believe speak to ways that humanists are striving to establish the relevance of our scholarship: locating the origins of present concerns in the past, and digging in to more interventionist and even activist modes of scholarship. I will also touch on the diversity in methodologies and, in conclusion, offer some thoughts as to where the economic humanities might go from here.

1. Thomas Piketty and Rip Van Winkle

It is telling that Thomas Piketty and not Karl Marx is the most-cited economist in this issue. Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013 in France, 2014 in English translation) documents that the grotesque income inequality characterizing the early twentieth century has been matched and indeed exceeded in our own time.¹ "US inequality in 2010 is quantitatively as extreme," Piketty writes, "as in old Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century" (293). As Nathaniel Cadle observes, Piketty substantiates the often-repeated comment that we inhabit a second Gilded Age (640). I would hazard that Piketty's drawing so strong a correlation between two historical eras, much more than his signature excursions into Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac, accounts for his appeal to literary scholars. Unlike Rip Van Winkle who slept for 20 years to awaken into an unfamiliar future, it seems that twenty-first-century Americans are trapped in a capitalist nightmare originating in the past. Many of the essays here seem haunted by the question of what in the past got us to the present moment.

Both Cadle and Sarah J. Townsend present the Gilded Age as a prequel to the Trump era. In "Money Mazes, Media Machines, and Banana Republic Realisms," Townsend focuses on a rarely discussed O. Henry novel that coined the term banana republic. Cabbages and Kings (1904) deserves our attention today, Townsend believes, precisely because O. Henry's fictional country so resembles the US of 2019. "What is a banana republic, after all," she asks, "if not a country where the reign of a foreign corporation and a plutocratic elite have come to trump and distort the rule of democratic law?" (688). Townsend notes that pundits began describing the US as a banana republic in response to the congressional shenanigans leading up to the January 2013...