News
// May 2025
Project Workshop No. 2, 14-15 May 2025, JLU Giessen
The second workshop is dedicated to the concept of 'imagination'/the 'imaginary' as one of the three central transdisciplinary concepts of the project. The question of economic knowledge and its (im)possibility is a central epistemic project in the social imaginary of the 19th century. The literature as well as the nascent sociology have addressed this, refining the monetary as a core component of the social imaginary.
Programme
// March 2025
Workshop Report 'On the Concept of Speculation'
A report on our first project workshop on the concept of 'speculation', written by Karsten Klein (Saarbrücken), was published on H-Soz-Kult on March 26, 2025.
You can read it here.
// December 2024
Project Workshop No. 1, 11-12 December 2024, JLU Giessen
The first workshop is dedicated to the concept of 'speculation' as one of the three central transdisciplinary concepts of the project. Speculation accompanies the emergence of economic/monetary knowledge from the long 19th century to the present day and occurs in different configurations in moments of doubt.
Programme
// September 2024
Joint panel: Congress of the European Society of Comparative Literature (ESCL), ‘Le jeu: Gambling, Gaming and Play in Literature’, 2-6 September 2024
Sorbonne Université, Paris
Our panel in Paris traced the manifold connections between economics, literature and sociology on the topic of 'play' from a sociological-literary perspective. In particular, it focused on speculation, gambling and game-theoretical approaches as 'playful' basic elements of a modern, aleatoric economic culture. The contributions to the panel complement the project's research on forms of economic knowledge, epistemic practices and aesthetic imaginaries. They engage in a dialogue between literary and sociological perspectives on the economic, shedding light on how both disciplines use the notion of play and speculation to adopt a critical and reflexive stance towards the economy.
Contributions to the panel:
- Prof. Dr. Kirsten von Hagen: “The Fabric of Dreams: Texture, Fashion, Gambling and Speculation on Social Advancement in Texts by Flaubert and Maupassant”
- Prof. Dr. Andreas Langenohl: “The Production of Uncertainty as Precondition for Speculation: Game Theory in Economics, Strategic Studies, Sociology, and Decentralized Finance”
- Felix Hempe: “Scenes of Speculation: The L’Année Sociologique and the Durkheimians”
- Marie-Theres Stickel: “The literary system: An institutionalised form of speculative literary economic gambling? On Adrienne Monnier’s Gazette des Amis des Livres”
[Publication of the papers in preparation.]
Photos: M. Stickel
// January 2024
New publication: Book chapter „Literatur und Soziologie als Genres der Reflexion monetären Wissens“ ("Literature and Sociology as Genres of Reflecting Monetary Knowledge")
We are pleased to announce a new contribution to the project: the chapter "Literatur und Soziologie als Genres der Reflexion monetären Wissens" ("Literature and Sociology as Genres of Reflecting Monetary Knowledge") by Prof. Dr. Kirsten von Hagen and Prof. Dr. Andreas Langenohl has just been published in the literary-sociological anthology 'Die drei Kulturen' reloaded (eds. Christine Magerski and Christian Steuerwald).
In the 19th century, the economy, and in particular the monetary economy (including credit and finance), which was growing in popularity and political importance, became a field of social relations that was increasingly visible as an epistemic problem. The chapter examines the ways in which the question of economic knowledge and its (im)possibility was intensively discussed in literature and sociology during this period.
Learn more