Also by Susan Bruce. Also by Valeria Wagner. SHAKESPEARE: King Lear (editor) THREE EARLY MODERN UTOPIAS (editor)

Transcription

1 Fiction and Economy

2 Also by Susan Bruce SHAKESPEARE: King Lear (editor) THREE EARLY MODERN UTOPIAS (editor) Also by Valeria Wagner BOUND TO ACT: Models of Action, Dramas of Inaction Literatura y vida cotidiana. Ficción e imaginario en las Américas

3 Fiction and Economy Edited by Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner

4 Introduction, Selection and editorial matter Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner 2007; Individual chapters contributors 2007 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

5 For Simone Oettli

6 Table of Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors ix x Introduction: Fiction and Economy 1 Susan Bruce and Valeria Wagner 1 Supreme Fictions: Money and Words as Commodifying Signifiers 24 Richard Waswo 2 Trafficking Words 45 Margaret Bridges 3 The Stain of the Signature 63 Peter de Bolla 4 Semiotics and Economics 82 Giulia Colaizzi and Jenaro Talens 5 Parties in Converse Literary and Economic Dialogue in Michael Almereyda s Hamlet 98 Mark Thornton Burnett 6 The Fabric of Society: Money, Cloth, and Symbolic Exchanges in Njal s saga 114 Fabienne L. Michelet 7 There s none / Can truly say he gives, if he receives : Timon of Athens and the Possibilities of Generosity Or The Gift of a Stranger 134 Susan Bruce 8 Spend, Spend, Spend: Expenditure and Waste in Hegel, Bataille, Derrida 152 Roy Sellars 9 Towards a General Economics of Cinema 167 Bruce Bennett Index 187 vii

7 Acknowledgements A number of people and institutions have played a part in the genesis of this volume. Fred Botting, of the University of Lancaster, and Ann Hughes, of Keele University, offered very useful comments and suggestions on our initial proposal for the collection; we thank them for their time, interest and support. The idea for the project originated during a colloquium at the University of Geneva, held to mark the retirement of Rick Waswo. We thank the University of Geneva for hosting that event and the Faculty of Letters, the Rectorate of the University, the English Department, the ASSH (Académie suisse des sciences humaines et sociales) and the Société académique de Genève for their generous funding, as well as Ancilla Stefani and Clare Tierque for their tireless help on that occasion. We thank Paula Kennedy, Palgrave's commissioning editor, for her support throughout the project, and Palgrave's anonymous reader for his or her constructive suggestions for improvement. Susan would like to thank successive years of students at the Keele, for their animated discussions of possibilities of generosity. Marguerite Palmer ought to know just what Susan owes her, but she would never think about it that way. And Daniel and Luke Lustig-Bruce have, over the past few years, reminded Susan not only of the early manifestation of the pleasures of giving, but also of the irritation that can ensue when you find that you ve spent all your pocket money on someone else, and now have none left over to buy anything for yourself. Seeing their names in print might (Susan hopes) help redress some of that maternally inflicted balance, but she also hopes that in years to come they ll agree that generosity always generates imperfect and incomplete economies and that s a good thing, by and large. Valeria would like to thank Saba Bahar once again, for her help with this project and with countless others over the years they worked together. Wonderful Clara was good natured about the various deprivations she suffered at the final stages of the book, and is hereby publicly acclaimed for her patience. Finally, Simone Oettli. Anyone who knows Simone knows also that she is a person of extraordinary, larger-than-life, warmth, generosity and courage. Our respective debts to her, as well as our recognition of those qualities in her, we mark in the dedication to the present volume. ix

8 Notes on Contributors Bruce Bennett (BA, Leeds; MA, Cardiff; PhD, Lancaster) is a lecturer in film studies at the Institute for Cultural Research of the University of Lancaster. He has interests in science fiction cinema, Chinese and Japanese cinema, and early cinema, as well as in Bataille and the economics of film production. Margaret Bridges has taught medieval English literature at various universities in Switzerland, especially Geneva (where she also received her PhD) and Berne (where she is a professor in the Department of English Languages and Literatures). Originally an Anglo-Saxonist working on the Old English poetic saints lives, she has since extended her research interests and publications to Middle and Early Modern English, foregrounding questions of closure, self-reflexivity, cross-cultural exchange and gender, in works as diverse as dream-visions, founding legends, medieval travel narratives and renaissance discourses of discovery. She is currently working on a book project (Embedding Literature) which explores discursive configurations linking literature to beds, whether in the form of commonplaces (such as that of abandoned lovers addressing their personified and fetishized beds) or in the form of the bed as locus of literary inspiration and production. Susan Bruce (BA, Cantab; MA and PhD, Cornell) is Senior Lecturer at Keele University ( s.e.bruce@keele.ac.uk). She is the editor of Three Early Modern Utopias (Oxford University Press, 1999) and of Shakespeare: King Lear (Palgrave, 1997), as well as the author of articles on various subjects, from More to Harper Lee, published in academic and more popular fora. She is currently embarking on a project with colleagues in English and Education departments at several UK universities, to try to ascertain what people think they are doing and how they do it when they teach English literature, the concerns of which, in her view, are not unconnected with her written contributions to this volume. Mark Thornton Burnett is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen s University, Belfast. He is the author of Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1997) and Constructing Monsters in Shakespearean x

9 Notes on Contributors xi Drama and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) and is the editor or co-editor of numerous other works. Giulia Colaizzi (MA in English, University of Bari; MA in Romance Languages, University of Valencia; ABD in Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota) obtained a PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of Valencia, where she is currently Associate Professor of Communication and Gender Studies. She has widely published on Film Theory and Feminism in Spanish, Italian, Swiss and US Journals, and authored, among other books, Feminismo y teoría del discurso and La pasión del significante. Peter de Bolla is Reader in Cultural History and Aesthetics at the University of Cambridge and the author most recently of Art Matters (Harvard, 2001) and The Education of the Eye (Stanford, 2003). His Fourth of July and the Founding of America will appear from Profile Press in Fabienne L. Michelet completed her licence at the University of Geneva, after which she studied at the Vatican Library in Rome, and in Oxford, where she undertook graduate studies on the Berrow Scholarship (1997 9) and on the Fellowship for Prospective Researchers of the Swiss National Science Foundation (2001 3). She did her doctorate at the University of Geneva, specializing in Old English literature. She is presently teaching medieval English literature both at the University of Geneva and at the University of Fribourg. Her research focuses primarily on Old English literature, exploring questions of space, place and geography. Her work in progress includes an interest in questions of heroism and agency, gender studies and historiography. She is the author of Creation, Migration, and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and the co-editor of Cultures in Contact, Past and Present: Studies in Honor of Paul Beekman Taylor. Multilingua 18 (1999). Roy Sellars is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Danish, University of Southern Denmark, Kolding, Denmark ( roy@ko.sdu.dk); in he is in residence at the Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, USA. A graduate of Oxford University, he previously worked at the Department of English, National University of Singapore; the Department of Comparative Literature and the Society for Humanities, Cornell University; the Department of English, Geneva

10 xii Notes on Contributors University and the Department of English, Marburg University. His current research projects include Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Adorno, Derrida and Bloom, as well as Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth and Beckett. He is co-editor (with Graham Allen) of Figures of Bloom: The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom (Cambridge: Salt, forthcoming) and (with Per Krogh Hansen) of Glossing Glas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming). Educational Remains: Back to School with Hegel (and Adorno), a companion to the present essay, appears in Parallax. Jenaro Talens is Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature and European Studies at the University of Geneva. He has published 15 books of poetry, both in Spanish and Catalan and translated into Spanish, among others, Shakespeare, Hölderlin, Goethe, Novalis, Trakl, Brecht, Pound, Walcott, Heaney, Judice and Petrarca. He has authored numerous books on Literary and Film History and Theory. Some of those available in English are Through the Shattering Glass: Cervantes and the Self-Made World (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), The Branded Eye (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and, as co-editor, Modes of Representation in Spanish Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Valeria Wagner is maître d enseignement et de recherche at the Faculty of Letters, University of Geneva, where she teaches in the Hispanic literature and Comparative literature programmes. She has published Literatura y vida cotidiana. Ficción e imaginario en las Américas (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2005), Bound to Act: Models of Action, Dramas of Inaction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), as well as various articles in English and French, bearing mainly on the imaginary of the Americas, the constitution of political imaginaries, and the historicity of the notion of action. Richard Waswo is professor emeritus of English, Université de Genève. A.B. Stanford, 1961; MA and PhD, Harvard, 1962 and He taught at San Francisco and San José State Colleges and the University of Virginia before coming to Geneva in He is the author of Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1987), The Founding Legend of Western Civilization (Wesleyan, 1997), and various articles on British writers from Chaucer to Scott. Nothing in professional life became him like the leaving it: some of the contributions in this volume were first presented at a conference in Geneva on his current research interest in the manifold relations between words and money.