We are delighted to invite you to the first lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025 Spring semester!
Sherryl Vint
(University of California, Riverside)
Bending Reality to Economics
Thursday, March 6, 2025
at 4:45 p.m.
You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.
Where?
Dobra 55, room 2.118
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
What?
This talk examines the nested narrative of Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust as a motif by which the novel engages with the form of the financialized economy, in parallel with how its plot reflects on the lives of New York’s financial elite. By reframing the story of the 1929 crash through several mediations from the ‘reality’—a novel-with-the-novel, notes for a biography, reflections on this process by the ghost writer of said biography, and finally a personal journal—Trust draws our attention to the financialized economy as an exercise of substituting models for the thing itself, with inevitable distortions and lost data. Drawing on Mary Poovey and Kevin R. Brine’s Finance in America as well as Robert J. Shiller’s Narrative Economics, this talk will explore how Diaz’s critique of the Wall Street excess engages on the formal level with the more recent 2008 crash, even as its story is set earlier, enabling the novel to both counter the way twenty-first century financial instruments make invisible how the economy creates greater economic disparity and to draw attention to the inevitability of more crashes given the structural contradictions of capitalism. The talk concludes with some thoughts on the importance of humanities techniques of narrative analysis in a context of highly abstracted economic practices.
Who?
Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she founded the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. She has published widely on science fiction, including, most recently, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction (2021), Science Fiction: The Essential Knowledge (2021), and Programming the Future: Speculative Television and the End of Democracy (2022, co-authored with Jonathan Alexander). She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television and is the Managing Editor of Science Fiction Studies and editor of the book series Science in Popular Culture.
