Just a business deal: Kafka, Strindberg, and the discourse of economy.

摘要

This dissertation relates Strindberg's Spoksonaten and Kafka's Die Verwandlung and Der Process to contemporary economic discourses in Sweden and Austria-Hungary at the beginning of this century. It combines a structural analysis of the texts with a historical contextualization and explores the relation between the frequent figurative and literal use of economic concepts in the fictional texts and the literal use of the same concepts in the contemporary economic debate.;Strindberg's and Kafka's involvement in economic enterprises serves as a point of departure in my analysis. In order to show how the three fictional texts participate in the economic discourses around 1907, 1912, and 1914, I juxtapose them with texts which discuss economic issues explicitly. First, I concentrate on the academic discourse in economic works and journals. Second, I examine the popular economic debate in newspapers, such as Svenska Dagbladet and Prager Tagblatt, which the authors read frequently.;Each chapter focuses on two or three controversial economic issues. I analyze debt, money, and speculation in Spoksonaten, debt and limited liability in Die Verwandlung, debt, money, and securities within war economy in Der Process. I also look at the main characters in their roles as business professionals.;All three fictional texts convey the tension between a static, absolute and a dynamic, relative conceptualization of economy. Confronted with complex situations, the protagonists attempt to understand abstract economic concepts in concrete and personal terms. While economic journals and works tend to adopt a positive attitude toward financial instruments, which they believe make modern economy more efficient and powerful, newspapers describing economic phenomena usually share or reflect the general public's distrust and suspicion toward abstract and relative economic concepts. Spoksonaten resonates this negative attitude toward virtual economy. Die Verwandlung and Der Process, however, are told in a matter-of-fact tone. In their treatment of business professionals, fictional and non-fictional texts alike are informed by the Social Darwinist notion of the survival of the fittest.