All News

Faculty Publication: Professor of English Michael Tratner

December 10, 2019

Modernism and Macroeconomics

Author: Michael Tratner

Publication Type: Book Chapter

Source: The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics, Chapter: 12, pp. 123-132

The word "macroeconomics" first appeared in print in 1945, a bit too late to be considered one of the sources of Modernist literary innovations. A number of critics have traced the influence of Depression-era economic policies on the Modernism of the 1930s, most strikingly Michael Szalay, who coined the term "New Deal Modernism" in his detailed account of the way numerous writers reacted to Roosevelt's economic policies. Much of modernism is an effort to find new ways to think and feel, an effort to disrupt and change the ways people visualize or represent the world, and thereby change unconscious habits and conceptions. Writers struggle to disrupt the words and images streaming through their minds, and many call for changes in the economic system to undo some of the deep distortions. Modernism is aligned with macroeconomics in the effort to change the "macro-cosmos" that surrounds and fills the minds of everyone.

Department of English