Derivative Images
Financial Derivatives in French Film, Literature and Thought
by Calum Watt
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Book Presentation:
Focused on French cultural responses to the 2008 global financial crisis in cinema, literature and theory, Derivative Images offers detailed analyses of post-2008 French-language works, including Les Effondrés (2010), Le Grand Retournement (2013) and L'Outsider (2016), to show how they appropriate and reconfigure notions at the heart of the crisis, such as derivatives, financial trading and markets.
Drawing on ideas from thinkers such as Jonathan Beller, Yves Citton and Peter Szendy, this book shows how derivatives can be taken as a conceptual resource for thinking about creative practice and the circulation of audio-visual images today.
About the Author:
Calum Watt is a European Project Officer at Université Paris Nanterre and an Associate Researcher at the Institut de recherche sur le cinéma et l’audiovisuel (IRCAV) at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. At IRCAV he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow from 2016 to 2018, researching French culture and the 2008 financial crisis.
Press Reviews:
If finance has become the interdisciplinary object above all others, then Calum Watt’s splendidly original book offers the reader an exemplary route through the points at which financial derivatives and artistic creation meet. Derivative images - in film, literature, theatre, and philosophy - allow us to reimagine effectively our post-crash world.
-- Alasdair King, Queen Mary University of London
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
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