Rezensionen Jacques-Henri Coste and Vincent Dussol, The Fictions of American Capitalism. Working Fictions and the Economic Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Julia Sattler In her collection The Network (2011), US poet Jena Osman uses semantics and etymology to point to the historical and present intersections of power, the financial markets, commerce and human existence in the city, in the attempt “to map a changing thing.” In an unlikely but not unprecedented turn, her poetry - shaped by notions of documentary poetics and archeological excavations alike - makes clear that there is no capitalism without language, and that capitalist ideas shape language and in turn are formed by it. Usually considered strange bedfellows at best, poetry and capitalism productively intersect in this work of cultural criticism, opening yet new doors for a twenty-first century (post-)capitalist poetics. Along similar and yet very different lines of investigation, Jacques-Henri Coste’s and Vincent Dussol’s collection titled The Fictions of American Capitalism. Working Fictions and the Economic Novel also establishes a productive relationship between economics - more specifically, American brand capitalism - and various genres of writing, arguing that “[f]or the United States, more so than for other countries, fiction and narrative were never the exclusive preserve of literature” (Coste & Dussol: 7). At the center of their investigation is the discussion of the market economy’s work with and reliance on stories and modes of storytelling as productive mediator between capitalism and ‘the world’ at large: “We argue,” the editors explain in their introduction, “that ideological and theoretical fictions, regimes of expectations and to some extent creative fiction […] should be counted among these mediating mechanisms” (ibid.: 7). The collection consists of three analytic parts - a Theoretical Overview, several discussions of Non-Literary Fictions of American Capitalism, as well as a third part on the Literary Representations of Capitalism. This is followed by AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0023 Rezensionen 248 a final section, which is called Coda here - a term referring to music and poetry alike - building and commenting on the connections established in the previous parts. The volume brings together the work of scholars from a variety of European countries, as well as from the United States with different research foci ranging from American literature and translation to politics to economic sociology. Reading this new publication during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, when, indeed, one can witness the global stock markets change in a matter of minutes depending on pandemic-related news - virus stories, if one were to use that term - was an especially interesting, yet certainly unintended, experience. Exploring fiction-led forms of capitalism in the first essay of Part I, Robert Boyer shows how “[f]ictions are necessary to overcome the radical uncertainty typical of capitalism” (63) - in other words, that the stock market or rather the entire economic system cannot function without stories that help make any predictions about the market. Jens Beckert’s article “Capitalism: Anticipating the Future Present” continues in this line with a discussion of how fictional scenarios move action on the market forward. Depicting the US as an ideal setting to explore the role of imaginaries in capitalism, this essay argues for the benefits of working with fictional scenarios under uncertain conditions, but also explores how the narrative of the “crisis” is used whenever an expected scenario does not play out. Concluding Part I, Stephen Shapiro’s work on what he calls “The Cultural Fix” looks back to the myth and symbol school and argues that “genres stand as resource fictions that become more pronounced when new social compromises are required for capital to continue, let alone expand” (91). One of several articles in the volume that build on Marx and Marxist ideas, Shapiro suggests taking Capital off the shelves and moving on to consider literature, especially American literature, beyond its periodization and in context of its social conditions. With a very interesting chapter investing in the role of storytelling techniques in branding and advertising efforts, Marie-Christine Pauwels starts off the second part of the collection focused on Non-Literary Fictions of American Capitalism. She unveils the role of storytelling in the development of new visions, and as a management tool - hers is an interdisciplinary approach intertwining research and practice that is certainly also useful to those wishing to work at the intersection of literary studies and marketing, or in the wide field of corporate social media, for example. Pierre Arnaud’s work in this part explores economic growth in connection with the American frontier myth suggesting the idea of endless expansion of the country, and, by implication, of the markets - capitalism, as he argues, is, essentially “a growth story” (126) with “the myth of the boundless economy” (134) at its center, which in turn lends capitalism its dynamics. Much in tune with the capitalist narrative of growth, he points to the storytelling of entrepreneurs as well as to the origin of what he calls “knowledge narratives” (142), Franklin’s Autobiography, which can also be read as a strategic development story. Much in tune with these findings, in his first of two essays in this volume, Jacques-Henri Coste addresses entrepreneurial capitalism, and the stories told by entrepreneurs, making evident that the literary and non-literary are intimately connected in those stories of rise Rezensionen 249 and fall, which also shed light on ideas about capitalism, progress and social agency at different times. The third part contains altogether ten essays and covers a variety of Literary Representations of Capitalism from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Topics explored range from the issue of forwarding the economic agency of women via literature - in Julia P. McLeod’s article using the example of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner - to the first novels about the American businessman in the oeuvre of William Dean Howells in Guillaume Tanguy’s essay. Along with Evelyn Payen-Variéras’s discussion of Frank Norris’s The Octopus, the first three essays in this part clearly point to the role of literary works in establishing modes of agency and responsibility via literature. They show how such figures as the businessman, the speculator or the monopolist were established and found their way into the mainstream - and into the capitalist system - via their rather complex negotiation and perpetuation in fiction. All of these findings lead the reader to question what characterizes an economic novel - a question also asked by Jason Douglas in his essay titled “Naturalism and Economic Calculability” which mainly looks at the work of Theodore Dreiser. Starting from a discussion of economic determinism - an idea that emerged alongside Darwinist ideas - this article argues that in an economic novel, characters are presented according to their economic position, which is not necessarily their position along the stratum of social class. In his analysis of works by Richard Wright and Ann Petry, William E. Dow also speaks to questions of social agency and the constructedness of the economic system, albeit with a focus on racialized capitalism and its destructive forces. While these earlier analyses are linked to literary realism and dive into the Progressive Era, the following essays - by Vincent Dussol on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Jean-Louis Brunel on William Gaddis’s VR, Sina Vatanpour on the works of Paul Auster and Martin Amis, Jacques-Henri Coste on Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and, finally, Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd on Thomas Pynchon - are united by their focus on postmodern works and contexts. Dussol’s analysis of Atlas Shrugged, including a discussion of its links to Norris’s The Octopus, contests its status as a Great American Novel and argues that contrary to its reputation among readers, the dystopia does not present capitalism in a positive light. Several of the subsequent essays speak to the difficulties of addressing what Vatanpour names the “affiliation between money symbols and words” (281), the relationship between tenor and vehicle in capitalist imagery and the question of a supposed “reality” vs. a supposed “fiction”, especially under conditions where “[m]oney that does not refer to any material value outside itself parallels fictional worlds that dramatize their supposed association with the realm of the real” (ibid.: 285). Moreover, these explorations make clear that fictional negotiations of capitalism and its various manifestations can be productive resources to research processes of transformation on the global markets, but also ideas relating to entrepreneurial growth and the workings of progress, as well as the ambiguous nature of capitalism at large. Chorier-Fryd’s analysis, for example, clearly points to the duality of the market when looking at the notion of the “dump” and the “frontier” in the work of Pynchon, and the possibility of resistance that is part and parcel of his oeuvre. Rezensionen 250 The collection shows that capitalism and literature are not simply strange bedfellows, but also an inspiring combination to conduct a variety of studies which, taken together, may even lead to the establishment of Economic Humanities. These investigations, as also becomes clear when reading the volume, can start out from a literary or non-literary perspective, and with a historical or contemporary focus. There is still much work to be done - be it in relation to the prevalent skepticism of many literary movements towards capitalism, in relation to New Economic Criticism, in terms of literature’s potential to “demystify” the workings of capitalism - or in terms of the semantics and etymology of global markets, as exemplified in The Network. Julia Sattler TU Dortmund