US economic value first emerges in fiction through miserliness and masochism

Evidence

But extreme conceptual possibilities are given in attempts to theorize slavery and in Sacher-Masoch’s “weird” contractual arrangements for his “masochistic” practices. We must pass over Michaels’s excellent discussion of these matters, except to observe that the issue of slavery anchors the book in the mainstream of American history, while the apparently aberrant foray into Eastern European materials in reality sets up the fundamental test case of The Gold Standard as a whole; namely, the combination, in Norris and above all in McTeague, of the twin phenomena of miserliness and masochism (in the person of Trina). Gold now finally makes its triumphant appearance in the “reality” of the naturalist text (as opposed to the phantasms and imaginary resolutions of juridical “theories” of slavery, on the one hand, or the “canon law” of masochism, on the other). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 447

Categorization

• XREF: Anchors the periodization thesis the reader wants: concrete mechanism linking economic form (gold, value) to aesthetic form (naturalism). — connects to: Economic value emerges through the distance exchange creates between self and object — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 250; Financial capitalism extracts value by exhausting the psyche itself — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 72
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Economic value emerges through the distance exchange creates between self and object — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 250; Financial capitalism extracts value by exhausting the psyche itself — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 72