capitalism Archives - Page 4 of 6 - Home For Fiction

capitalism

How to Be “Good Enough” at Writing

June 20, 2022

How can we be good enough at writing? Maybe the question puzzles you. “I don’t want to be just ‘good enough’ at writing”, you might say. “I want to to be excellent! The best!”

And yet, have you ever wondered whether there’s a paradox in a situation where the world wants us all to be “the best”?

Inspiration for this post came after I saw a short documentary about Jiro Ono, arguably the world’s best sushi chef. At the age of 85 (at the time of the documentary, some 10 years ago), he was still working long hours at his diminutive restaurant. In the documentary, we see him and his son, together with some apprentices, working hard to prepare the day’s sushi.

But there are dark clouds under this facade of perfection, that most people fail to notice. Yet, if you’re wondering whether you shouldn’t be just “good enough” at writing because you want to be excellent, such details are worth paying attention, as we’ll see in this post.

good enough writing — Here’s a photo from my 2017 trip to Greece. If being excellent (at anything) involves missing out on experiencing life, I don’t want it. I much rather just be “good enough” – at writing and anything

(more…)

Mediocre Fiction: Why Is There so Much of It?

March 28, 2022

Writing

capitalism, fiction, literature, society, writing

Mediocrity is one of the things that occupy much of my time – on the blog and otherwise. We’re surrounded by mediocrity, and there are clear, simple reasons for this, which I’ll talk about in this post. More importantly, for the topics of the blog, what concerns me is mediocre fiction.

The whole concept is somewhat tricky. After all, I’ve claimed that:

You get the idea…

So, if literature is very hard to approach objectively, how can we speak of mediocre fiction? To put it another way, what makes mediocre fiction… mediocre?

(more…)

Vampire Capital: Social Classes in Dracula

December 27, 2021

Criticism

academia, capitalism, criticism, Gothic, society

Note: the following article on Vampire Capital and Social Classes in Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 127-131) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see the list on the main website.

The emergence of the Gothic – particularly the Victorian Gothic – can be traced to the development of the market. The mid-nineteenth century also coincides with one of the most important theoreticians on capital, Karl Marx, who used numerous Gothic metaphors for his references to capitalism:

Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist (342).

Additionally, there is an association between, on the one hand, ghosts and specters, and, on the other, the transcendent nature of commodities and the invisibility of wealth. The association is facilitated through the introduction of economic devices such as the stock market and the prevalence of paper money (Smith, 149–150).

Andrew Smith claims that such an element can also be found in A Christmas Carol, as Scrooge’s wealth “is both there (hoarded) and not there (not in circulation)”, with a parallel formed between the “spectrality” of money and that of ghosts (150). Scrooge becomes a prime example – if not an actual personification – of this very invisibility of wealth.

For Marx, vampire capital was an apt metaphor of how capitalism becomes engorged by parasitically sucking life out of labor

(more…)