Inflationary Modernities

Collecting ten essays from prominent and emerging scholars of diverse backgrounds, this book offers distinctive perspectives from both the Global North and South a range appropriate to the multifaceted phenomenon it takes as its object of investigation. Collectively, these essays emphasize the importance of the book s topic. As the consumer price index reaches historic highs across the world, the need to think about inflation in all its aspects has never been more urgent. If inflation frustrates the economists best efforts to theorize it coherently, the time has come to ask questions about where the boundaries of economics lie and to re-evaluate the assumption that inflation is primarily an economic phenomenon. Rather than offering a dogmatic analysis that would assert what inflation really is, this book theorizes its shifting forms, furnishing the reader with a multidimensional, non-totalizing understanding of its mechanisms. In doing so, the book opens up new possibilities for grappling with one of the most pressing problems of our time.

Chapter 1. Introduction: Inflationary Modernities. - PART 1: LITERATURE. - Chapter 2. Green-Lighting Gatsby: Austere Modernisms, Exuberant Avant-Gardes, and their Orgastic Futures. - Chapter 3. Tall Tales and Inflating Bodies: Difference and Repetition in Ng g wa Thiong o s Wizard of the Crow. - Chapter 4. The Work of Art in the Age of AI Reproduction: Inflationary Scripting After Walter Benjamin. - Chapter 5. Real and Nominal Appearance in Ozick s Puttermesser Papers. - Chapter 6. Money and Monetarism: Fiscal Policy, Postmodernism, and Inflation s Specter. - PART 2: CULTURE. - Chapter 7. Mark of Shame: On the Surface of the Weimar Hyperinflation. - Chapter 8. Money to Blow: Inflation in F. Scott Fitzgerald s The Great Gatsby. - Chapter 9. Meaning, Truth, Emancipation: From Inflation to Subtraction. - Chapter 10. Generation Inflation: Pelevin and the Political Economy of Affect. - Chapter 11. Project Cybersyn, Keynes, and Virtuality.