Priceless: Fiction, Finance and the Fantasy of Home

My dissertation analyzes the relationship between home and value in contemporary American literature and media. I look at the role that the concept of home plays in the feedback loop created between the culture and the economy, where representations of home and value affect the way that Americans invest in economic assets, and assumptions embedded in the financial markets affect cultural narratives. The fantasy that home is priceless---as in beyond economic reckoning---and yet at the same time so valuable as to support endless economic weight played a particularly crucial role in the most recent mania and panic. A range of contemporary American authors and cultural producers responded to the crisis of the early 2000s by engaging specifically with value and the priceless fantasy of home.;Beginning with home improvement programming like Extreme Makeover Home Edition, whose rise and fall closely tracked the bubble in real estate prices in America, I argue that home's function as either a hoard or a treasure was importantly similar to gold's function. Cultural narratives invested in home's imagined supreme equivalence, or its transcendent independence, to anchor value in uncertain times. Home's preciousness was imagined as both aesthetic artistic independence and as a connection to "real life.";Reality television based on home improvement boomed alongside the real estate market. Cameras, both still and video, in reality television generally and home improvement in particular, became necessary witnesses: they gave access to private spaces and captured the precious "real life" located inside homes. Working in the shadow of an increasingly digitized and televised market culture, literary and other "high-art" aesthetic producers engaged with both cameras and the value of home in an effort to harness that same, precious "real." Authors writing about house and home wanted to claim it as a source of authenticity and aesthetic value for their novels. I include work by Jonathan Franzen, Chang-Rae Lee, Gary Shteyngart and Paul Auster, Joan Didion, and also Helen Hunt Jackson's sentimental nineteenth century novel Ramona which serves as a contrasting example from an earlier bubble.