Dr Benjamin Pickford (University of Nottingham, IASH Postdoctoral Fellow): Capital in American Poetics: Late Nineteenth-Century Literary Theory as Economic Thinking
The nineteenth-century was the epoch of political economy in Europe. In the United States, however, no abstract economic theory of note appeared between the Constitutional period and the professionalization of economics as a discipline at the end of the century. This work-in-progress seminar will foreground the core reasons for why I consider the poetic practices of three American authors—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Adams—to be the nearest American philosophy got to an engagement with the epistemological conditions of capitalism in the nineteenth-century. My argument is not that any of these authors sought to critique or undermine the expansion of capitalism’s influence; on the contrary, all three authors express a sense of inextricability from the system of capital even at this (comparatively) early stage of its development. Instead, I will demonstrate how this ineluctable complicity is registered in their writing practice, and illustrate how the literary might have offered a site to conceptualize the operation of capital that was not open to the historically and economically situated individual subject.