Looking through the Economic Lens

The interplay between Smith, Engels, Carlyle, and Eliot drew our attention, perhaps inevitably, to the economic, though, as I suggested in class a different set of "contextual" readings for Eliot's novel would have drawn our attention to other matters in the text. For example, we might have read about Victorian conceptions of women, the "angel of the hearth," the gendered division of labor and been drawn to Eliot's representation of Eppie and Nancy.

The focus on the economic, though, was intentional and intended to get us thinking about one of the key "causes" that produces the "effect" of urbanization, in particular the emergence of the industrial city, a purely 19th century phenomenon. But asking questions about a text's economy and representations of the economic is one of the most basic and prevalent interpretive strategies, often characterized as Marxist literary criticism, but embedded in much New Historicist, Feminist, Queer, Postcolonial, and Poststructuralist criticism. For those interested in something a bit more schematic than our open class discussion, here are a few questions modified from Eve Sedgwick's own web-based "Heuristics for Reading Nineteenth-Century Fiction" (note that she designed these questions for the nineteenth-century novel but they can easily be reworked for most any literary text):

1. How does this text define "old" and "new" in relation to family, class relations, and/or national identity?
2. What valuation is attached to the narrative of historical change?
3. Is the possibility of deliberate social transformation suggested anywhere? If so, what kind of transformation? In what light, and in what detail, is it presented? On what energies in the text does it draw?
4. In what social and economic matrices is the work produced? Consumed? Circulated? What activities surround it? What class-marked behaviors does it, or is it meant to, provoke or consolidate?
5. What, if any, images of vocation (of people's empowerment to produce cultural meaning) are produced? What are the gender, sexual, class, national, racial bearings of these?
6. Where does the money in the world of the text come from? Are different kinds of economic activity or property in evidence? If so, what are the most important differences among them? How is the money generated, cared for, transmitted, accumulated, spent? For what is it exchanged, and on what basis?
7. Are there economic relations that you know were or can assume were important in the historical setting of the text or in the historical setting of the writing of the text that are absent from its own presentation? What do you make of that?
8. What historical narratives are embedded or dramatized in the text's economic plot? What choices have been made in their representation or non-presentation?
9. What differences in people's economic/class placement are assumed in the text? Which are interrogated? How and to what effect?
10. How does the text draw the line of what activities, etc., are to be considered economic? What does the text seem to exclude from the realm of the economic? Are these distinctions made along divisions between genders, between classes, between "the family" and "the state," between "the self" and "society," between "sexual" and "political," between production and reproduction (including procreation), between production and consumption, etc.? What are the economic relations of the activities that are not described in economic terms?
11. What are some important thematic and imagistic representations of economic production, accumulation, consumption, etc., in the text? From what realms are they drawn, and why? How are they related to each other? In what ways do they raise the issue of the representational issues internal to economics?