THE RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE JOB: THE RIGHT JOB FOR OUR TOOLS

Mary Poovey

doi:10.7146/nja.v29i60.122834

Abstract

This article ponders the questions of why so many literary scholars want to bring literary and economic issues together now, and why it seems so difficult to establish a genuinely cross-disciplinary con-versation.1 Offering two examples of approaches to the intersec-tion of literary and economic issues that privilege methodology over themes, history, or theory—a very brief genealogy of the concept of a national economy and an equally brief analysis of derivatives—the article calls for an ongoing reflection on whether literary and cultural scholars have the right tools for the job and, conversely, the right job for our tools.

Highlights

Ever since the publication of Martha Woodmansee’s essay collection in 1999,2 many literary scholars have attempted to bring our work into some relation to economic issues
In the United States, this situation had begun to change in the late 1940s with the creation of the Council of Economic Advisors, but the first two decades of this presidential advisory body were characterized by infighting among the advising economists and repeated charges that the economists’ supposedly objective recommendations were examples of thinly disguised ideological advocacy
Governmentemployed economists enhanced the reputation of their discipline through at least two routes: first, they created data-rich models that helped legislators repair war-ravaged economies after World War II (Jan Tinbergen, working in the Netherlands, comes to mind, as do Wassily Leontief, the Russian who developed inputoutput models for the US economy, and John Maynard Keynes, the great British economist, who addressed the problem of Germany reparations); and second, in the United States, the economists chosen to advise the President promoted politically popular growth models over the controversial cyclical models previous members of the Council of Economic Advisors had favored

Summary

Introduction

Ever since the publication of Martha Woodmansee’s essay collection in 1999,2 many literary scholars have attempted to bring our work into some relation to economic issues. One way literary scholars might go beyond addressing economic themes in literary texts is to use our tools to investigate economic issues and the claims economists make (both about their discipline and about economies more generally).

Results

Conclusion