Economic Narratives Reflection
I was interested in economic narrative because I wanted to look at the way the two elements interact in different ways, particularly how economics and economic systems are depicted and effect a fictional narrative (Jane Austen’s works are a great example of this!) and how people (e.g. politicians) tell or spin certain narratives in real life.
In the course, both in the reading an in the intensive we explored the blending of literature and economics, looking at many different forms of this combination. The reading was largely focused on various economic crises and all of the elements which these entail. I was worried at first as some of it was quite complex economics and numbers which was hard to understand, however the intensive was great and as it was largely in a seminar format anything we were confused about was explained well and we got to have complex, in depth discussions about the material and other related things, exploring the historical, economic, and literature perspectives/ different blends of economic narratives.
We also did group work where we explored one topic and how economic narratives were conveyed. Our group looked at greenwashing and how companies often lie in advertising.
Some notes:
-many different ways to tell a narrative – e.g. visual economic narrative e.g. fashion
-economic systems, companies, corruption, financial crashes
-echo from World as Story – brought up again what makes certain narratives contagious/ sticky – very interesting, important
-really good course!
-Made me think of economic systems in fiction – specifically Snow Crash and, much more subtly, What you are looking for is in the library, which I read most recently, amongst other examples such as depictions of economic systems in dystopias (e.g. 1984).
For my essay I wrote about how Jane Austen depicts the economics of the time in her texts, especially in relation to character, how this interacts with other themes such as class and gender, and how important it is to her texts.
Potentially Relevant Texts:
