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Chapter 5 - Fully Reflecting

Knowing the Mind of the Market in DeLillo and Kunzru

from Part III - The Market Knows

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2019

Paul Crosthwaite
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

This chapter devotes extended attention to two novels from either end of the “efficient market era” – Don DeLillo’s Players (1977) and Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men (2011) – that model their narrative forms on the information-crunching prowess of the financial markets’ price mechanisms, only to leave absences in the textual fabric that defy a totalitarian logic of epistemological capture. The juxtaposition of these two novels highlights how changing technological instantiations of efficient market theory have elicited shifting formal responses, and underscores both why the ideology of the efficient market has retained a hold over the imaginations of novelists, and why that hold is subject to increasing self-critique. The chapter argues, moreover, that Kunzru overtly presents his novel’s lack of conclusiveness as opposed not only to the market epistemology of contemporary finance, but also to the norms of the literary marketplace, with its own preference for narrative closure and transparency.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • Fully Reflecting
  • Paul Crosthwaite, University of Edinburgh
  • Book: The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction
  • Online publication: 04 July 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108583787.006
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  • Fully Reflecting
  • Paul Crosthwaite, University of Edinburgh
  • Book: The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction
  • Online publication: 04 July 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108583787.006
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Fully Reflecting
  • Paul Crosthwaite, University of Edinburgh
  • Book: The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction
  • Online publication: 04 July 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108583787.006
Available formats
×