Geld der Zukunft: Kryptowährungen in neuerer Literatur

Wider research context: Cryptocurrencies pose a moment of disruptive innovation in contemporary finance. While literary portrayals of economic crises and speculation have been subject to previous research, narratives on how the financial system of the future may look like and what it entails in terms of agency, semiotics and knowledge production, have thus far escaped thorough analysis. This project sets out to close this gap by analyzing exemplary texts of fiction on the topic of cryptoeconomics and the transformation of financial markets.
Objectives: It aims to carry out the first literary, if also cross-disciplinary, investigation into the field of cryptoeconomics and literature. The project seeks to explore how literary fiction adds to the public understanding of fundamental change in day-to-day communication and economic markets by tracing literary models that respond to notions of disruptive innovation in economic thought, such as cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology as a narrative technology.
Approach: By dissecting a transatlantic dialogue between contemporary American and Austrian fiction in the field of economic thought, the study seeks to understand how American writers and their take on economic fictionalization have been influential to Austrian literature and vice versa: How Austrian writers have had an impact on American fiction. By closely analyzing Elfriede Jelinek’s reading of Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis as well as Don DeLillo’s reading of Peter Handke, the project is particularly interested in the ways in which their respective dialogue on the language of finance critically engages with a terminology that was evolving from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the opening decades of the century and continued to influence the rhetoric on financial thought of the 1960s including texts by Oswald Wiener and Elias Canetti.
Innovation: The study combines original theoretical work from the field of literary studies, anthropology, and semiotics with an innovative approach to research on the financial system of the future by observing both synchronic links in contemporary fiction with diachronic links to economic schools evolving from fin-de-siècle Vienna that continue to be of importance in contemporary economic thought. The project also asks how “blockchain” as a narrative technology provides a theoretical tool to better analyze literature that no longer adheres to classical concepts like plot and narration, but adopts avantgarde and experimental strategies. The investigation raises a novel awareness of wide-reaching implications of blockchain technology and provides unexpected and radically new perspectives on complex processes of change and the flow of the financial market.
Primary researchers involved: The PI holds a doctorate in German studies. Dr. Rebecca Schönsee has published on the poetics of breath and emanation in Viennese Modernism, (neo)-avantgarde literature, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Jelinek and Pynchon.