Sprecher
Beschreibung
My current book project examines the significance of contemporary science and speculative fictions to ideas about economic freedom and concepts of collective economic living. What work precisely do these fictions accomplish in these areas of knowledge? How do their forms, narrative techniques, rhetorics and discourses, as well as cultural functions and institutions relate to them? As the editors of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics (2022) assert, how literary texts register the pressures of the literary marketplace—“the economic pressures to which they are most directly exposed”—presents one of the key ways in which they “offer singularly insightful cognizance of economic forms and processes” (Crosthwaite, Knight, and Marsh 3). I am curious in particular, then, about the relationship between the ways in which markets for science and speculative fictions have been organized since the postwar era and the treatments that different forms of economic organization have received in these fictions at the same time. Which pressures do these treatments register, and by which means?
Bio:
A. Elisabeth Reichel is Assistant Professor of American Studies (Akademische Rätin a.Z.) at Osnabrück University. She is the author of Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict (U of Nebraska P, 2021) and co-editor of Boasian Aesthetics: American Poetry, Visual Culture, and Cultural Anthropology (spec. issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2018). Her forthcoming publications include the special issue Posthuman Economies: Literary and Cultural Perspectives (Interconnections, April 2023) and an article in Book History titled "Unmaidenly Labor: Helen Wright's Collection of Autographed Books, Literary Labor in the Modernist Market, and Edith Wharton,“ which is based on archival work conducted at Vassar College and seeks to advance the discussion of how literary studies and book studies scholars can do justice to an understanding of literary production as integrally involving forms of labor that have historically been undervalued. Together with Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor and Stephanie Peebles Taverna, she is co-editor of the journal Utopian Studies (Penn State UP).