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Theoretically sophisticated and politically engaged, Scandals and Abstraction is a tour-de-force treatment of how financial logics circulated in 1980s' literature and culture. La Berge asks compelling questions and the answers she provides offer startling insights into some of the ways financialization has altered our lives. --Mary Poovey, author of Genres of the Credit Economy Taking up the question--what is a financial age, and what is a financial aesthetic mode?--La Berge bypasses the now-familiar discovery of a genre of the finance economy to register the ways that financial logics have increasingly colonized literature as such, much as they have colonized the larger economy. In so doing, Scandals and Abstraction develops surprising categories and concepts in a bravura effort to reconcile Marxist and poststructuralist approaches. This is a dangerous game and period-defining intellectual quest; La Berge plays explorer in ways agile, nuanced, and innovative. --Joshua Clover, author of Of Riot For the economists Kiyotaki and Moore, money is 'strange stuff.' Financial monies, in the apparent opacity of their workings, seem yet stranger. La Berge brings clarity to the financial turn by way of the founding assumption that the material practices of an economy--options, futures, derivatives--traceably contain the logic of its aesthetic forms. A template text for those who would understand cultural change at the close of the American century, Scandals and Abstraction is theoretically informed and intellectually graceful. I learned from it even as I enjoyed it. --Richard Godden, author of William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words

Theoretically sophisticated and politically engaged, Scandals and Abstraction is a tour-de-force treatment of how financial logics circulated in 1980s' literature and culture. La Berge asks compelling questions and the answers she provides offer startling insights into some of the ways financialization has altered our lives. --Mary Poovey, author of Genres of the Credit Economy Taking up the question--what is a financial age, and what is a financial aesthetic mode?--La Berge bypasses the now-familiar discovery of a genre of the finance economy to register the ways that financial logics have increasingly colonized literature as such, much as they have colonized the larger economy. In so doing, Scandals and Abstraction develops surprising categories and concepts in a bravura effort to reconcile Marxist and poststructuralist approaches. This is a dangerous game and period-defining intellectual quest; La Berge plays explorer in ways agile, nuanced, and innovative. --Joshua Clover, author of Of Riot For the economists Kiyotaki and Moore, money is 'strange stuff.' Financial monies, in the apparent opacity of their workings, seem yet stranger. La Berge brings clarity to the financial turn by way of the founding assumption that the material practices of an economy--options, futures, derivatives--traceably contain the logic of its aesthetic forms. A template text for those who would understand cultural change at the close of the American century, Scandals and Abstraction is theoretically informed and intellectually graceful. I learned from it even as I enjoyed it. --Richard Godden, author of William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words

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Leigh Claire La Berge is Assistant Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York and the coeditor, with Alison Shonkwiler, of Reading Capitalist Realism.

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