Scandals and abstractions: 1980s finance and the revaluation of American culture

This dissertation reveals how the burgeoning force of transnational finance became contested ground of representation in 1980s American culture. Using recent work in political economy, the project examines three areas of 1980s cultural production in which finance marks the intersection of changing social relations and aesthetic forms. The first section examines how finance was theorized in political economy as a return of a form of capitalism last seen in the 1920s. I argue that the representation of finance in political economic work as temporal form of value provides a basis for narrative analysis. Secondly, through a reconstruction of theories of postmodernity and post-industrialism, I explore why finance has eluded cultural theorization. Under what conditions did production expire as a grounding trope of theoretical discourse, and how does finance as a theoretical form occupy an interstitial ground between Marxism and post-structuralism? Thirdly, and most substantially, I follow the representation of finance in cultural production as financial objects and practices proliferated in cultural texts.;My title, Scandals and Abstractions: 1980s Finance and the Revaluation of American Culture suggests the two ways that 1980s finance has been memorialized: the infamous Wall Street scandals of 1980s print culture and, more recently, as a problem of abstraction in social theory. Reading the vernacular and theoretical together allows me to trace the transformation of finance into a cultural form. I introduce the term "financial masculinity" as an optic of narrative analysis in order to examine how realist and postmodern novels offer competing visions of the relationship between finance and gendered and racialized violence. Finally, I relate the changing form of cultural production under increased media consolidation to the depiction of finance in popular film.