The Financial Imaginary: A Masterclass and Lecture by Alison Shonkwiler

The Financial Imaginary: A Masterclass and Lecture by Alison Shonkwiler

The Novel Network and the Department of English, University of Sydney, are pleased to announce a masterclass and lecture by Professor Alison Shonkwiler, Rhode Island College. Shonkwiler’s monograph The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction (2017) explores how contemporary realist fiction confronts the challenges of financial abstraction and the return to Gilded Age levels of inequality. In 2014 she co-edited (with Leigh Claire La Berge) Reading Capitalist Realism, a collection of essays that explore literary realism by bringing capitalism back to visibility against our seeming inability to distinguish between capitalism and reality.

The masterclass will read across these two books to discuss the relationship between contemporary realist fiction, Marxism, and narrative form. It is intended for Postgraduates and Early Career Researchers. Interested participants will attend three preparatory sessions of readings from Professor Shonkwiler’s work and select others, and the masterclass will be held on June 21. On June 22 Professor Shonkwiler will deliver a lecture on ‘Finance and the Novel.’

If you would like to participate in the masterclass, please send an expression of interest to Melissa Hardie <melissa.hardie@sydney.edu.au> by May 12. The first reading session is scheduled to meet on Tuesday 16 May, 5:00-6:30 in S226, John Woolley Building with subsequent meetings at the same time and place on Tuesday May 30 and June 13.

Masterclass: June 21, S226, John Woolley Building, 2:00-4:00

Lecture: June 22, New Law Lecture Theatre 106 (tbc), 5:00-7:00.

Author: Melissa Hardie

My research began with Modernism and I wrote my PhD on Djuna Barnes and American expatriate writing. I still publish on Barnes in this context, most recently a chapter titled "That Man In My Mouth: Editing, Modernism and Masculinity” in an edited collection Modernism and Masculinity: Literary and Cultural Transformations (Cambridge University Press 2014). Now I am interested in the afterlives of Modernist texts, and am currently writing a chapter on the cinematic citation of Djuna Barnes that expands a keynote paper I gave at The First International Djuna Barnes Conference hosted in collaboration with the Institute English Studies, Birkbeck College, and the British Association for American Studies in September 2012.

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The Financial Imaginary: A Masterclass and Lecture by Alison Shonkwiler