As part of my Marie Curie project on speculative finance and speculative fiction, I’m organising another event on the 18th of April. Sherryl Vint, one of the leading scholars of Science Fiction in the world today, will come to RUC to talk about the nested narrative of Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust as a motif by which the novel engages with the form of the financialized economy, in parallel with how its plot reflects on the lives of New York’s financial elite. By reframing the story of the 1929 crash through several mediations from the ‘reality’ this narrative relates—a novel-with-the-novel, notes for a biography, reflections on this process by the ghost writer of said biography, and finally a personal journal—Trust draws our attention to the financialized economy as an exercise of substituting models for the thing itself, with inevitable distortions and lost data. Then, I will engage in a dialogue with Sherryl Vint in the debate around the importance of fiction in contesting the teleology of financial capitalism and new forms of humanities techniques of narration in the age of speculative finance. The event will conclude with an opportunity to ask questions.

There will be some coffee, tea, and cake at the event. Virtual participation is possible.