Does finance has its say in literature?

[blazeofglory]

Does finance has a voice in literature? Today we are particularly in developed countries more concerned about finance. Fat cats anger all of us, the middle class, the poor, the salaried, and the wage earners. Finance had a huge role in shaping Russian literature- Maxim Gorky hails from vilifying the feudal class society. So was Charles Dickens, just to name a few. Today Occupy Wall Street is something we find whinily high-pitched on our streets.
This is not a political argument and I know this forum does not want political commentaries here. This is solely about finding some literary scopes in finance or reversely financial latitudes in literature.
This does not invite a mock grimace, I hope and this is only about the possibility that literature finds something exhilarating in finance to add to it something we humans are gravely concerned about.
Finance is a huge domain, and we know books of history do not become complete without financial material. No writer today succeeds without the issue of finance. This is a great reality, as great as the role of religion in literature, yet little has been done to make the world of finance inclusive while doing literary things

[cacian]

Finance is the drive to everything even to thoughts. Literature is only a small fraction of it but albeit it a fraction.
To write is to make money is the wrong way to go about it.
The making money machine does not like words it likes glossy books with glossy pictures on them so that it can sell them as quick as possible and make more paper money.
If a book was a factory the making money machine will make it produce thousands of similar books typed and glossed within the hour.
A bit like tin food all done under the supervision of a human but never by human.
If we let money rule our minds we will soon invent ourselves a computer producing story gadget that would write for us and all we have to do and sit and watch the words being typed together as some kind of art. Forget about reading by then.

[stlukesguild]

Cacian- To write is to make money is the wrong way to go about it.

Samuel Johnson would have disagreed with you- "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

I suspect Shakespeare would disagree as well. The reality is that although Art and Money are strange bedfellows... they are bedfellows none the less. Art has always followed money and power. Although I find many questions left unanswered, Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies makes a strong argument for the reason art follows money. He points out that in a culture of civilization in which the majority are struggling to make ends meet... often spending the majority of their efforts in what must be done to simply survive... there is not the time, the resources, or the support needed for the creation of art. Most of the great artistic flowerings occurred in cultures of wealth and power where there was a great support for the arts.

Yes, the publishers and producers and financiers and accountants are in the arts solely for the money... but while their support also makes it possible for the production of many of the greatest works of painting, sculpture, film, photography, novels, poetry, and theater of our time. Contrary to the Romantic ideal of the "starving artist", it is a hell of a lot easier for an artist to achieve something when he or she has a solid financial support and is not living in some hovel somewhere worried about where the next meal will come from.

[Shevek]

Finance is the drive to everything even to thoughts. Literature is only a small fraction of it but albeit it a fraction.
To write is to make money is the wrong way to go about it.
The making money machine does not like words it likes glossy books with glossy pictures on them so that it can sell them as quick as possible and make more paper money.
If a book was a factory the making money machine will make it produce thousands of similar books typed and glossed within the hour.
A bit like tin food all done under the supervision of a human but never by human.
If we let money rule our minds we will soon invent ourselves a computer producing story gadget that would write for us and all we have to do and sit and watch the words being typed together as some kind of art. Forget about reading by then.

Funnily enough there's a professor in the history department at my university who studies 'machine-reading' of texts. The idea is to get computers to essentially "read" entire corpuses of books that would take a human months to read in order to mine as much information as possible. He claims this has huge potential for discourse analysis in history. But *even if* - a big if - this kind of technology becomes popular (which is unlikely, given the failures of some American English departments in using digital mining) it won't replace the need for humans to read and interpret. I think it will only complement it.

On the question of finance in literature more generally, then, it has a place. So long as we live under capitalist regimes writing books will require wealth whether we read them or computers do. What I am concerned with is the publishing process itself, particularly in academic publishing where the profit margins are incredibly high. It is unfortunate that for this reason a lot of really great histories will never reach the public. I see a lot of potential for the internet in this regard, although right now it is still the domain of companies trying to rake in more sales rather than making books more accessible.

[cafolini]

Maybe we should get rid of money. ROFLMAO