How Abstract Is It? Thinking Capital Now

Rebecca Colesworthy is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at New York University, New York City, USA, and holds an English Ph.D. from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. She has published a number of articles on literature, theory, and gender studies, and is currently completing a manuscript on modernism and the gift. Peter Nicholls is Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University, New York City, USA. His publications include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (1984), Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1995, 2009), George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (2007, 2013), and many articles and essays on literature and theory. He has recently co-edited On Bathos (2010) and Thinking Poetry (2013).

Introduction: Capital’s abstractions 1. ‘Paradise falls: a land lost in time’: representing credit, debt and work after the crisis 2. To think without abstraction: on the problem of standpoint in cultural criticism 3. Materialism without matter: abstraction, absence and social form 4a. An exchange with Susan Stewart 4b. Abstraction set 5. From capitalist to communist abstraction: The Pale King’s cultural fix 6. The bodies in the bubble: David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King 7. Shareholder existence: on the turn to numbers in recent French theory