In the counting-house of language: Accounting, capitalism, and American identity, 1782--2000

"In the Counting-house of Literature: Accounting, Capitalism, and American Identity, 1782--2000" seeks to explain the role of accounting, what Karl Marx refers to as the "nominal shape" of capital, in American literature. Elaborating a specifically national explanation of mystification, Max Weber defines capitalism as an economic system underwritten by the narrative that rationalizes capital. From this perspective I consider the emergence and development of American literature in the context of the concomitant ascendance of a nationally-based account of capital as two narrative forms that try to track events and values. Spanning the periods of agrarianism, mercantilism, slavery, industrialism, regulatory and late capitalism, I analyze the dense interplay between the account book and the literary book through close readings of six texts representative of these periods: J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, Benjamin Franklin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, William Faulkner, and Richard Powers.; In each chapter I seek to demonstrate how these authors' experiments in form are organized around features of capital accounting that rhetorically and historically constitute the economic concepts these texts thematize. Whereas Crevecoeur takes the use of accounting to yield more crops as an operational narrative that makes possible both self-management and self-governance, Franklin racializes the credit/debit structure of the ledger, equating debt with racial slavery and credit with whiteness, to stabilize identities newly minted in the expanding markets of the Republic. I read Stowe's sentimentalism---her response to accounting within plantation slavery---in terms of the rise of the humanized relations of labor managerial industrialism offered. Thoreau advocates instead for a proprietary individualism to prioritize his own sets of metaphysical equivalences over the corporate practices of double-entry accounting driving commercial expansionism. For Faulkner, the New Deal accounting regulations that update capitalism overlook the historical debts that remain posted to the national ledger. It is from a similar perspective that Powers questions the prospects for repayment as American history has become, for him, indistinguishable from its economic history. This project revises conventional understandings of the connections between economic and cultural formations of American identity to argue that American literature is coined within the nation's counting-house.