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This book contends that mainstream considerations of the economic and social force of culture, including theories of the creative class and of cognitive and immaterial labor, are indebted to historic conceptions of the art of literary authorship. It shows how contemporary literature has been involved in and has responded to creative-economy phenomena, including the presentation of artists as models of contentedly flexible and self-managed work, the treatment of training in and exposure to art as a pathway to social inclusion, the use of culture and cultural institutions to increase property values, and support for cultural diversity as a means of growing cultural markets. Contemporary writer...
Combining analysis with detailed accounts of authors' careers and the global trade in literature, this book assesses how postcolonial writers respond to their own reception and niche positioning, parading their exotic otherness to metropolitan audiences, within a global marketplace.
Emily Witt is single and in her thirties. She has slept with most of her male friends. Most of her male friends have slept with most of her female friends. Sexual promiscuity is the norm. But up until a few years ago, she still envisioned her sexual experience achieving a sense of finality, 'like a monorail gliding to a stop at Epcot Center'. Like many people, she imagined herself disembarking, finding herself face-to-face with another human being, 'and there we would remain in our permanent station in life: the future'.But, as we all know, things are more complicated than that. Love is rare and frequently unreciprocated. Sexual acquisitiveness is risky and can be hurtful. And generalizing a...
Focusing on its literary programming in particular, this study of UNESCO shines a light on the close relationship between state-backed economic development and the global postwar cultural policy establishment.
People looking for works in cities are immersed in English as the lingua franca of the mobile phone and the urban hustle – more effective instigations to reading than decades of work by traditional publishers and development agencies. The legal publishing industry campaigns to convince people to scorn pirates and plagiarists as a criminal underclass, and to instead purchase copyrighted, barcoded works that have the look of legitimacy about them. They work with development industry officials to 'foster literacy' – meaning to grow the legal book trade as a contributor to national economic health, and police what and how the newly literate read. But harried cash-strapped audiences will read what and how they can, often outside of formal economies, and are increasingly turning to mobile phone platforms that sell texts at a fraction of the price of legally printed books.
Art and Value is the first comprehensive analysis of art's political economy throughout classical, neoclassical and Marxist economics. It provides a critical-historical survey of the theories of art's economic exceptionalism, of art as a merit good, and of the theories of art's commodification, the culture industry and real subsumption. Key debates on the economics of art, from the high prices artworks fetch at auction, to the controversies over public subsidy of the arts, the 'cost disease' of artistic production, and neoliberal and post-Marxist theories of art's incorporation into capitalism, are examined in detail. Subjecting mainstream and Marxist theories of art's economics to an exacting critique, the book concludes with a new Marxist theory of art's economic exceptionalism.
Critical Branding: Postcolonial Studies and the Market provides an original answer to what Sarah Brouillette has called postcolonial studies’ ‘longstanding materialist challenge’, illuminating the relationship between what is often broadly called ‘the market’ and the practice and positionality of postcolonial critics and their field, postcolonial studies. After much attention has been paid to the status of literary writers in markets, and after a range of sweeping attacks against the field for its alleged ‘complicity’ with capitalism, this study takes the crucial step of systematically exploring the engagement of postcolonial critics in market practice, substituting an automati...
This volume explores various new forms, objects and modes of circulation that sustain this renovated form of Orientalism in South Asian culture. The contributors identify and engage with pressing recent debates about postcolonial South Asian identity politics, discussing a range of different texts and films such as The White Tiger, Bride & Prejudice and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love.
Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family...
During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free world. Novels, stories, plays, and poems, they believed, could inoculate weak minds against simplistic totalitarian ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of global catastrophe, and just maybe prevent the like from happening again. As the Cold War began, high-minded and well-intentioned scholars, critics, and writers from across the political spectrum argued that human values remained crucial to civilization and that such values stood in dire need of formulation and affirmation. Creative writing emerged as a graduate discipline in the United States amid this astonishing swirl of grand conceptions. Workshops of Empire explores this history via the careers of Paul Engle at the University of Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. In the story of these founding fathers of the discipline, Eric Bennett discovers the cultural, political, literary, intellectual, and institutional underpinnings of creative writing programs within the university Book jacket.