The Canadian Association for American Studies is pleased to announce CAAS- sponsored Panels at the next American Studies Association meeting, Toronto, October 8-11, 2015

The theme of the 2015 annual ASA meeting is The (Re)production of Misery and the Ways of Resistance.

Full information can be found here:

http://www.theasa.net/annual_meeting

Free Market Fictions

Organizer: Geordie Miller (Dalhousie University)

This is one of four panels that the ASA has invited the Canadian Association of American Studies to coordinate.

Can fictional works estrange us from the free market life-world we inhabit? How do they resist, repurpose, or reflect the capitalist social relations that shape this life-world? Our panel invites papers that develop a response to these questions and their critical assumptions. Potential allies or antagonists in the American intellectual field include (but are not limited to) Frederic Jameson, Michael Clune, and Walter Benn Michaels. Are we still under the ideological spell of market fascination, which Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism traces to popular attitudes about the market that emerged in the wake of World War II? Do specific genres, like the novel, augur an “aesthetic transformation of the economic” (Clune)? Or are contemporary novels symptomatic of the political logic that sanctions the free market (Michaels)? Should fiction and cultural criticism be more free from economic questions and concerns? Or is such freedom a miserable goal?

Possible topics may include:

The free market as fiction

Works of art versus art commodities

Marxist sociology of literature

“Financial fiction” (La Berge)

Literary industries/labor

An aesthetics of Wall Street

“Capitalist realism” (Schudson, Fisher)

Austerity and allegory

Up to 250 words (1 page) proposals with short CVs to: geordie.miller@gmail.com by January 26, 2015.