The cultural fix: capital, genre and the times of American Studies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/va.i40.173472Keywords:
World literature, Comparative literature, Literary literatureAbstract
Franco Moretti (2005) claims that the narrative forms we call genres have perceivable longevities, due to their relative use and exchange value as cultural commodities. Focusing on the post-1800 European novel, he argues that particular genres have a life cycle of about 25–30 years before their efficacy on the marketplace erodes. Why, though, do genres not only have a wave-like pattern of rise and fall, but also diminish (or reappear) in clusters at inflection points such as the “late 1760s, early 1790s, late 1820s, 1850, early 1870s, and mid-late 1880s”? This group movement means, for Moretti, the presence of a “causal explanation [that] must be external to the genres, and common to all: like a sudden, total change of their ecosystem. Which is to say, a change of their audience. Books survive if they are read and disappear if they aren’t: and when an entire generic system vanishes at once, the likeliest explanation is that its readers vanished at once”. The disappearance of aggregated genres marks the lifespan of a “generation,” a duration of readers’ particular “mental climate”.
Downloads
References
BERCOVITCH, Sacvan and Myra JEHLEN, eds. Ideolo-gy and classic American literature. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1988.
DAVIDSON, Neil. Uneven and combined develop-ment: modernity, modernism, revolution. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/84340602.pdf. Accessed 1 June 2019.
DAVIS, David Brion. Some themes of counter-subver-sion: An analysis of anti-Masonic, anti-Catholic, and anti-Mormon literature. The Mississippi Valley Histori-cal Review 47(2): 20524, 1960.
DECKARD, Sharae, and Stephen SHAPIRO. World li-terature, neoliberalism, and the culture of discontent. New York: Palgrave, 2019.
DENNING, Michael. Mechanic accents: Dime novels and working-class culture in America London: Verso, 1987.
DENNING, Michael. The cultural front: The laboring of American culture in the twentieth century. 2nd ed. London: Verso 2011.
FEIDELSON, Charles. Symbolism and American litera-ture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.
GRAMSCI, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Note-books. Trans. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith. New York: In-ternational Publishers, 1971.
HARVEY, David. The limits to capital. Oxford: Bla-ckwell, 1982.
HARVEY, David. Paris, capital of modernity. New York: Routledge. Hofstadter, Richard. 1954–1955.
HOFSTADTER, Richard. The pseudo-conservative re-volt. The American Scholar 24(1): 9–27, 2003.
HOFSTADTER, Richard. The paranoid style of American politics. Harper’s Magazine November: 77–86, 1964a.
HOFSTADTER, Richard. The paranoid style in Ame-rican politics and other essays. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964b.
JAMESON, Fredric. 1979. Reification and utopia in mass culture. Social Text 1: 130–48, 1979.
KUKLICK, Bruce. Myth and symbol in American Stu-dies. American Quarterly 24: 435–450, 1972.
LEWIS, R. W. B. The American Adam: Innocence, tra-gedy, and tradition in the nineteenth century. Chica-go: University of Chicago Press, 1955.
LUXEMBURG, Rosa. The accumulation of capital. Trans. A. Schwarzschild. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951.
MARX, Karl. Le Capital. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.
MARX, Karl. Capital. New York: International Publishers, 1967.
MARX, Karl. Capital: Volume 2. Trans. D. Fernbach. London: Penguin, 1978.
MARX, Karl. Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen ökonomie. Erster band Hamburg 1890. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1991.
MARX, Karl. Le Capital. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993.
MARX, Leo. The machine in the garden: Technology and the pastoral ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
MORETTI, Franco. Graphs, maps, trees: Abstract mo-dels for literary history.London: Verso, 2005.
ROGIN, Michael Paul. Ronald Reagan, the movie and other episodes in political demonology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
SANFORD, Charles L. The quest for paradise: Europe and the American moral imagination. Urbana: Univer-sity of Illinois Press, 1961.
SHAPIRO, Stephen. The culture and commerce of the early American novel:Reading the Atlantic world-system. University Park: Penn State University Press.Shapiro, Stephen. 2008b. Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula’s world-system and Gothic periodicity. Gothic Studies 10 (1): 29–47, 2008.
SHAPIRO, Stephen. The Weird’s World-system: The long spiral and literarycultural studies. Paradoxa 28: 256–277, 2016.
SHAPIRO, Stephen. The culture of realignment: Enli-ghtened and ‘I can’t breathe’. In Navigating the trans-national in modern American literature and culture: Axes of influence, eds. Doug Haynes and Tara Stubbs: 141–161. London: Routledge, 2017a.
SHAPIRO, Stephen. The cultural fix: Social labor--power and capital’s long spiral. In Ecologies, technics, & civilizations I: Capitalism’s ecologies, MOORE, Jason W. and D.C. GILDEA, eds. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2020.
SHAPIRO, Stephen and Philip Barnard. Pentecostal modernism: Lovecraft, Los Angeles, and world-sys-tems culture. London: Bloomsbury, 2017b.
SMITH, Henry N. Virgin land: The American West as symbol and myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950.
TRACHTENBERG, Alan. Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and symbol. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.
WARD, John William. Andrew Jackson: symbol for an age. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.
WARWICK RESEARCH COLLECTIVE (WReC). Combi-ned and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Steven Shapiro
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
