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Fictions of Speculation: Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2015

HAMILTON CARROLL  and
ANNIE McCLANAHAN
HAMILTON CARROLL
Affiliation:
School of English, University of Leeds. Email: h.e.m.carroll@leeds.ac.uk.
ANNIE McCLANAHAN
Affiliation:
Department of English, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Email: mcclanah@uwm.edu.
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Extract

There are plenty of texts in which one might not be surprised to find an alien invasion on only the second page, but The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (2010) – the seven-hundred-page document produced by the Congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission – is hardly one of them. The Inquiry Report opens by invoking the dizzying difficulty of its own task: from “millions of pages of documents,” the Inquiry Report begins by noting, its authors have attempted to understand events compared, just in the Inquiry Report's first two pages, to “mass delusion,” “a hurricane,” a “perfect storm,” a “train wreck,” and, finally, an “alien event.” This proliferation of metaphors suggests an encounter with a set of historical conditions whose magnitude and complexity render them recalcitrant to representation. What overwhelms the authors of the Inquiry Report is not simply the complexity – the length and breadth – of the story to be told, but the question of what sort of story it should be: if the crisis was described even by those who should have been in the know as “dramatic and mystifying,” how could one render it legible while at the same time doing justice to its singularity?

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 49 , Special Issue 4: Fictions of Speculation , November 2015 , pp. 655 - 661
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2015 

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References

1 The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States, 2010, at www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf, accessed 12 Feb. 2015, 3, 4.

2 Ibid., 3.

3 Ibid., 4.

4 Ibid., 6.

5 See Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).

6 We should also note that another recent government document, The 9/11 Commission Report, was also widely praised for its “readability” and for its similarities to the sort of engaging writing usually associated with summer blockbusters and genre fiction. For a discussion of this see Craig A. Warren, “‘It Reads Like a Novel’: The 9/11 Commission Report and the American Reading Public,” Journal of American Studies, 41, 3 (2007), 533–56.

7 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 2.

8 Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge, eds., Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 15.

9 Ibid., 1.

10 For a range of essays on the financial crisis and popular culture, with a particular focus on issues of gender, see Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, eds., Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

11 Michael W. Clune, “Beyond Realism,” in Shonkwiler and La Berge, 195–212, 195.

12 Marjorie Nicholson, “The Professor and the Detective,” quoted in Arthur Krystal, “Easy Writers: Guilty Pleasures without Guilt,” New Yorker, 28 May 2012, at www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/05/28/easy-writers, accessed 12 Feb. 2015.