Leigh Claire La Berge's Books

Marx for Cats

A Radical Bestiary

By: Leigh Claire La Berge

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Marx for Cats

A Radical Bestiary

By: Leigh Claire La Berge

At the outset of Marx for Cats, Leigh Claire La Berge declares that “all history is the history of cat struggle.” Revising the medieval bestiary form to meet Marxist critique, La Berge follows feline footprints through Western economic history to reveal an animality at the heart of Marxism. She draws on a twelve-hundred-year arc spanning capitalism’s feudal prehistory, its colonialist and imperialist ages, the bourgeois revolutions that supported capitalism, and the communist revolutions that opposed it to outline how cats have long been understood as creatures of economic critique and liberatory possibility. By attending to the repeated archival appearance of lions, tigers, wildcats, and “sabo-tabbies,” La Berge argues that felines are central to how Marxists have imagined the economy, and by asking what humans and animals owe each other in a moment of ecological crisis, La Berge joins current debates about the need for and possibility of eco-socialism. In this playful and generously illustrated radical bestiary, La Berge demonstrates that class struggle is ultimately an interspecies collaboration.

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Page Count

237

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1478023880

ISBN 13

9781478023883

Wages Against Artwork

Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art

By: Leigh Claire La Berge

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Wages Against Artwork

Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art

By: Leigh Claire La Berge

The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality. In Wages Against Artwork Leigh Claire La Berge shows how socially engaged art responds to and critiques what she calls decommodified labor—the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which socially engaged artists relate to work, labor, and wages, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own and others' financial precarity; why the increasing role of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labor; and how the expansion of MFA programs and student debt helps create the conditions for decommodified labor. In showing how socially engaged art operates within and against the need to be paid for work, La Berge offers a new theorization of the relationship between art and contemporary capitalism.

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Page Count

183

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1478005270

ISBN 13

9781478005278

Scandals and Abstraction

Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s

By: Leigh Claire La Berge

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Scandals and Abstraction

Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s

By: Leigh Claire La Berge

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 Wall Street, 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, Scandals and Abstraction chronicles how American society's increasing concern with finance found expression in a large array of cultural materials that ultimately became synonymous with postmodernism. The ever-present credit cards, monetary transactions, and ATMs in Don De Lillo's White Noise 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 The Bonfire of the Vanities and Oliver Stone's Wall Street 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 American Psycho, 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 Merger Mania, Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal, and T. Boone Pickens's Boone. A look at Jane Smiley's Good Faith 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. Drawing on a diverse archive of novels, films, autobiographies, and journalism, Scandals and Abstraction 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.

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Page Count

241

Published Date

ISBN 10

019937287X

ISBN 13

9780199372874

Reading Capitalist Realism

By: Leigh Claire La Berge

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Reading Capitalist Realism

By: Leigh Claire La Berge

As the world has been reshaped since the 1970s by economic globalization, neoliberalism, and financialization, writers and artists have addressed the problem of representing the economy with a new sense of political urgency. Anxieties over who controls capitalism have thus been translated into demands upon literature, art, and mass media to develop strategies of representation that can account for capitalism’s power. Reading Capitalist Realism presents some of the latest and most sophisticated approaches to the question of the relation between capitalism and narrative form, partly by questioning how the “realism” of austerity, privatization, and wealth protection relate to the realism of narrative and cultural production. Even as critics have sought to locate a new aesthetic mode that might consider and move beyond theorizations of the postmodern, this volume contends that narrative realism demands renewed scrutiny for its ability to represent capitalism’s latest scenes of enclosure and indebtedness. Ranging across fiction, nonfiction, television, and film, the essays collected here explore to what extent realism is equipped to comprehend and historicize our contemporary economic moment and what might be the influence or complicity of the literary in shaping the global politics of lowered expectations. Including essays on writers such as Mohsin Hamid, Lorrie Moore, Jess Walter, J. M. Coetzee, James Kelman, Ali Smith, Russell Banks, William Vollmann, and William Gibson, as well as examinations of Hollywood film productions and The Wire television series, Reading Capitalist Realism calls attention to a resurgence of realisms across narrative genres and questions realism’s ability to interrogate the crisis-driven logic of political and economic “common sense.”

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Page Count

272

Publisher

University of Iowa Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1609382633

ISBN 13

9781609382636

Wages Against Artwork

Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art

By: Leigh Claire La Berge

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Wages Against Artwork

Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art

By: Leigh Claire La Berge

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Page Count

183

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1478005270

ISBN 13

9781478005278

Scandals and Abstraction

Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s

By: Leigh Claire La Berge

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Scandals and Abstraction

Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s

By: Leigh Claire La Berge

Scandals and Abstraction offers an in-depth study of epochal works like White Noise by Don DeLillo, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, alongside the key moments of financial history that inform them"--

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Page Count

230

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199372896

ISBN 13

9780199372898

Book's by Leigh Claire La Berge

Marx for Cats

Marx for Cats

Wages Against Artwork

Wages Against Artwork

Scandals and Abstraction

Scandals and Abstraction

Reading Capitalist Realism

Reading Capitalist Realism

Wages Against Artwork

Wages Against Artwork

Scandals and Abstraction

Scandals and Abstraction

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