Salto mortale: Narrative, speculation, and the chance of the future

"Salto Mortale: Narrative, Speculation, and the Chance of the Future," reads contemporary American fiction and contemporary economic form through the act of speculation, the attempt to look into and imagine the uncertain future. The present market crisis has laid bare the fact that the last three decades of American economic life have been dominated by finance capital. But we have not yet realized how profoundly this form of capitalist accumulation has changed our sense of history itself. My dissertation argues that "speculative" finance has transformed how we relate to the past and, ultimately, how we imagine the future.;In a metaphor borrowed from Immanuel Kant's account of speculative philosophy, Karl Marx describes financial speculation as a salto mortale, or fatal leap, into the unknown. Marx's appropriation makes plain that speculation---as a cognitive as well as a financial act---engineers a future both uncertain and imminent, both risky and foreseeable. In our own moment of volatile finance, the future is commodified by derivatives, quantified by risk management models, and preempted in fiscal policy and military strategy. Brief, knowable, and instrumentalized, the financialized future is no longer connected to the past and no longer promises utopian possibility.;As a mode of linking the present with the to-come, the real with the unreal, speculation is also an imaginative and narrative act. My dissertation considers how speculation has defined contemporary narrative forms and how those narratives challenge finance capital's historical ideology. In my opening chapter, I look at contemporary apocalyptic fiction and film alongside the exuberant "end of history" discourse of the late 1990s and argue that these narratives derive both their temporality and their politics from financial derivatives. Chapter 2 locates a more critical response to late postmodernity in the increasingly popular genre of counterfactual history. Iraq War counterfactuals like Paul Auster's Man in the Dark and Richard Kelly's film Southland Tales use this speculative form to index the traumas of the first fully privatized war, while post-9/11 counterfactual novels by Michael Chabon and Philip Roth register neoliberalism's violent negation of liberal democracy. In Chapter 3, I read the emerging genre of 9/11 fiction alongside the forms of political forecasting created by the RAND Corporation, arguing that both post-9/11 literature and post-9/11 politics struggle to comprehend an event at once familiar and unpredictable. My dissertation concludes by considering the fate of cultural representation in a moment of global financial crisis. I examine the ways that the horror film draws on the temporality of suspense to respond to the credit crisis and to the financialization of risk; connecting these films to terrorism novels by Viken Berberian and Mohsin Hamid and to the 2008 film The Taking of Pelham 123, I discover a unique mode of speculative allegory that illuminates the dialectical relationship between finance, violence, and literary form.