New Economic Criticism: A Review of the Conference by Michael Rectenwald and John Kuiljper

What could economists and literary/textual critics have to offer each other? Such was the question posed at the SCE's international conference on “New Economic Criticism,” where economists and literary critics convened to discuss their connections, contracts, and disparities. Although it became obvious that scholars from the two disciplines were not truly engaging each other, by the Saturday evening session this demon of discourse was exorcised and the entire group had begun an open discourse about the relations between the disciplines.

By the end of the conference, it was clear that the groups had indeed much more to discuss; groups are meeting again.

To define a “New Economic Criticism” it becomes necessary to consider what an “Old Economic Criticism” might have been. For over a century, a criticism of commerce has nearly defined a discipline. Since the Romantic period, aesthetics and literature have been formalized as a reaction to the utilitarian ethics of the burgeoning of commercialism. Wordsworth, Schiller, and even an economist named Marx provide critiques of this ethic. For Wordsworth and Schiller, culture is conceived of as an anodyne, whereas for Marx, culture is itself an excrescence of the economy. Marx posits us in the crucible of an impossible consciousness, a consciousness which is at once a symptom and corrective of a diseased economic body.

Despite the problematic stipulated by Marx for all considerations of cultural enterprise, the dominant paradigm for culture had remained that promulgated by Wordsworth and Schiller. Culture has been conceived of as a palliative, as a respite against the presumptive triumph of economic vulgarity. But the Romantic period was more than a reaction to commerce. It is also a reaction to a wider textual dissemination made possible by the printing press and other means of transport. Likewise culture becomes a preserve of the best productions; a critical position advanced through the Victorian era by Matthew Arnold. Modernists and New Critics develop this stance to its logical end, so that by the middle of the twentieth century, an antagonism between cultural and economic production is received as a natural heritage. For modernists, the intimate connection of certain cultural goods with mass production disqualifies them from the domain of cultural critique. Adorno and the Frankfurt school realize Modernism's possible alignment with Marxism, and from what might seem strange bedfellows, a wholesale cultural criticism is born.

While this cultural criticism has transmogrified since the Frankfurt school days, such that mass culture has been re-envisioned by subsequent critics (Raymond Williams, John Fiske, Michel de Certeau, to name a few), wherein the consumers of mass culture are seen to be more or other than mere dupes or “cultural dopes,” literary and other textual critics retain an antipathy to commerce. Commerce is seen as the site for the manipulation, exploitation, and/or degradation of cultural heritage. This review is certainly cursory, as it is reductive.

But it serves a purpose because the hybridization that follows would be unweildy without some of these constructs in place.

Literary/textual critics are (or should be) concerned with the question of whether culture is resistant to subsumption within the economic. Several papers suggested such a resistance, which would challenge a sweeping acceptance of a Marxist base/superstructure model. This question should be the motivating force behind much criticism, as it carves a niche wherein literary/cultural critics act as the textual workers in a New Economic Criticism. New Economic Criticism thus becomes a distinct field, to which economists and textual critics are both contributors, and which has as its central concern the question of Value, the nexus of human beings and their things.