Gold Fever: Money and the American Novel cancelled
The Wolf of Wall Street; The Dark Knight Rises, and David Cronenburg’s Cosmopolis: all Hollywood films released in the last three years, and all about money. America’s love affair with telling stories about money has a long and fascinating tradition. Looking at a number of novels from the 20th and 21st centuries (such as The Corrections, American Psycho, and The Great Gatsby), we will examine how the American tradition engages with economics and creates fictions about finance. We will survey the history of the American novel, following its development through realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism, and we will cover historical topics such as the roaring 20s, the Great Depression, the dot.com bubble, and the recent financial crisis. Authors likely will include Jonathan Franzen, Bret Easton Ellis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Wright, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, and Nathanael West.