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  3. Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt

Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt

Robin Truth Goodman
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  • Overview

  • Contents

There is no doubt that the beginning of the twenty-first century was marked by crises of debt. Less well known is that literature played a historical role in defining and teaching debt to the public. Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt addresses how neoliberal finance has depended upon a historical linking of geopolitical inequality and financial representation that positions the so-called “Third World” as negative value, or debt. Starting with an analysis of Anthony Trollope’s novel, The Eustace Diamonds, Goodman shows how colonized spaces came to inhabit this negative value. Promissory Notes argues that the twentieth-century continues to apply literary innovations in character, subjectivity, temporal and spatial representation to construct debt as the negative creation of value not only in reference to objects, but also houses, credit cards, students, and, in particular, “Third World” geographies, often leading to crisis. Yet, late twentieth century and early twenty-first literary texts, such as Soyinka’s The Road and Ngugi’s Wizard of the Crow, address the negative space of the indebted world also as a critique of the financial take-over of the postcolonial developmental state. Looking to situations like the Puerto Rican debt crisis, Goodman demonstrates how financial discourse is articulated through social inequalities and how literature can both expose and contest the imposition of a morality of debt as a mode of anti-democratic control.
  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Contents
  • Introduction
  • 1. Futures and Fictions: The Right to Make Promises and the Object That Never Was
  • 2. Debt’s Geographies: Inequality, or Development’s Dance with Dead Capital
  • Notes
  • Works Cited
The complete proposal of this work was subjected to fully closed ("double-blind") peer review; the complete manuscript was subjected to partly closed ("single-blind") peer review. For more information, please see our Peer Review Commitments and Guidelines.
Citable Link
Published: 2018
Publisher: Lever Press
Copyright: 2018
Copyright Holder: Robin Truth Goodwill
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license
ISBN(s)
  • 978-1-64315-002-4 (open access)
  • 978-1-64315-000-0 (paper)
Subject
  • LITERARY CRITICISM / General
  • LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory

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Syllabus for Studies in Critical Theory: Literature and Debt

Syllabus for Studies in Critical Theory: Literature and Debt, ENG 5049 (Spring 2017), instructed by Professor Robin Truth Goodman at Florida State University.

Lever PressAnn Arbor, MIinfo@leverpress.org

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