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Books by Rebecca Colesworthy

Since the start of the financial crisis in 2008, the notion that capitalism has become too abstra... more Since the start of the financial crisis in 2008, the notion that capitalism has become too abstract for all but the most rarefied specialists to understand has been widely presupposed. Yet even in academic circles, the question of abstraction itself – of what exactly abstraction is, and does, under financialisation – seems to have gone largely unexplored – or has it? By putting the question of abstraction centre stage, How Abstract Is It? Thinking Capital Now offers an indispensable counterpoint to the ‘economic turn’ in the humanities, bringing together leading literary and cultural critics in order to propose that we may know far more about capital’s myriad abstractions than we typically think we do. Through in-depth engagement with classic and cutting-edge theorists, agile analyses of recent Hollywood films, groundbreaking readings of David Foster Wallace’s sprawling, unfinished novel, The Pale King, and even original poems, the contributors here suggest that the machinations and costs of finance – as well as alternatives to it – may already be hiding in plain sight. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

Papers by Rebecca Colesworthy

This paper argues that Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) provides a critical counterpoi... more This paper argues that Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) provides a critical counterpoint to a cluster of recent discourses on the gift, autonomy, and the changing nature of labor in the contemporary creative economy. From Lewis Hyde’s best-selling The Gift to neo-Marxist accounts of post-Fordism, these discourses routinely adopt modernist notions of autonomy in order to characterize creative labor today. Woolf’s feminist vision of autonomy in A Room of One’s Own at once dovetails with and complicates these discourses. In suggesting that feminine creative power, or “gifts,” both are and are not measurable by a monetary standard, she reinforces a familiar tension between gifts and commodities. But in her attentiveness to the material conditions of creativity, she also refuses to let the ideal of autonomy become an alibi for precarity, as is so often the case with feminized labor in our own creative economy. Ultimately, I argue that A Room of One’s Own reads as notes toward the possibility of a measure of the value of the gift as a gift—a measure that need not come at the expense of economic equality.

Textual Practice, Nov 2014

Modernist Cultures, Oct 2014

This paper intervenes in the longstanding debate over modernism’s relationship to the market by t... more This paper intervenes in the longstanding debate over modernism’s relationship to the market by taking the publication of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Marcel Mauss’s landmark essay, The Gift, in 1925 as a prompt to remap the historical and conceptual intersections between Anglo-American modernist literature, economic discourse, and twentieth-century theories of gift exchange. Drawing a crucial distinction between a modernist fascination with the gift and a modernist fascination with the primitive, I argue that Mauss uniquely conceived what John Maynard Keynes called the “end of laissez-faire’’ in terms of a shift in our collective thinking about gifts and exchanges. Via her sympathetic and critical characterization of Clarissa Dalloway, Woolf then figures this shift in terms of the emergence of a feminine ethos of hospitality. In furthermore establishing literature’s centrality to fostering this ethos, she also anticipates, while historicizing and gendering, the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, one of Mauss’s primary heirs.

Journal of Modern Literature, Apr 2014

This paper reframes Jean Rhys’s critique of bourgeois culture in her second novel, After Leaving ... more This paper reframes Jean Rhys’s critique of bourgeois culture in her second novel, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, in terms of theories of the gift. On the one hand, Mackenzie genders the ideological separation of gift and exchanges that Marcel Mauss argued was peculiar to Western culture and works to counter the concomitant failure of reciprocity between the sexes. On the other hand, the novel echoes Derrida’s revision of Mauss, rendering the gift and especially its male and female characters’ desire for the gift impossible. Ultimately, gift theory helps us to rethink motifs in and beyond Mackenzie, such as Rhys’s “masochism” and her representation of men and women as victims, and to illuminate the paradoxes at the heart of gifts of money and contractual relations more generally in her fiction.

Angelaki, Dec 2013

Drawing on Lacoue-Labarthe’s deconstruction of Oedipus as a figure of both desire and work in his... more Drawing on Lacoue-Labarthe’s deconstruction of Oedipus as a figure of both desire and work in his tragic pursuit of knowledge, this paper maps Lacan’s radical reorientation of the philosophical categories of desire, work, and knowledge in his theory of the four discourses. While all four discourses constitute libidinal and political economies, only the hysteric’s discourse entails both the desire for and the production of knowledge—particularly mythical knowledge with its impossible truth of sexual difference. Returning to Sophocles’s Antigone in light of Seminar XVII, I argue that if Antigone has all but replaced Oedipus as a figure for modern subjectivity it is because she, like the hysteric, is a figure of not only desire but work under capitalism.

Book Reviews by Rebecca Colesworthy

Women's Studies Quarterly, Jun 2014