Scandals and Abstraction

<p>The Long 1980s could be summed up handily in the annals of U.S. cultural history with the enduring markers of Ronald Reagan's presidency Oliver Stone's film<em> Wall Street</em> and Dire Straits's hit single "Money for Nothing." Despite their vast differences each serves to underscore the confidence jingoism and optimism that powered the U.S. economy throughout the decade. Mining a wide range of literature film and financial print journalism <em>Scandals and Abstraction</em> chronicles how American society's increasing concern with finance found expression in a large array of cultural materials that ultimately became synonymous with postmodernism.</p><p>The ever-present credit cards monetary transactions and ATMs in Don De Lillo's <em>White Noise </em>open this study as they serve as touchstones for its protagonist's sense of white masculinity and ground the novel's narrative form. Tom Wolfe's <em>The Bonfire of the Vanities</em> and Oliver Stone's <em>Wall Street</em> animate a subsequent chapter as each is considered in light of the 1987 stock market crash and held up as a harbinger of a radical new realism that claimed a narrative monopoly on representing an emergent financial era. These works give way to the pornographic excess and violence of Bret Easton Ellis's epochal <em>American Psycho</em> which is read alongside the popular 1980s genre of the financial autobiography. With a series of trenchant readings La Berge argues that Ellis's novel can be best understood when examined alongside Ivan Boesky's <em>Merger Mania</em> Donald Trump's<em> The Art of the Deal</em> and T. Boone Pickens's <em>Boone</em>. A look at Jane Smiley's <em>Good Faith</em> and its plot surrounding the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s concludes the study and considers how financial reportage became a template for much of our current writing about of finance.</p><p>Drawing on a diverse archive of novels films autobiographies and journalism <em>Scandals and Abstraction</em> provides a timely study of the economy's influence on fiction and outlines a feedback loop whereby postmodernism became more canonical realism became more postmodern and finance became a distinct cultural object.</p>