Reading like economists to reimagine the humanities.

The 2008 financial crisis and its global repercussions engendered an outpouring of film and fiction, documentary and popular economics books as well as mainstream media representation and discussion. Yet, amid such overt creative efforts to portray and critique economic inequality, literary scholars seem at a loss on how to incorporate this momentum in the English department. Caught in a difficult catch-22, English studies are faced with a need to respond critically to cultural production that engages with economics, yet are facing pressure from the neoliberal university's funding cuts and undermining of the critical thinking skills, ethics, imagination and imaginary that make up humanities disciplines. As a way out of the circular and disjointed efforts of literary critics and scholars from across the humanities to defend our disciplines, this paper looks to social science critics of neoliberal capitalism for their deployment of literature and the imagination in thinking alternative economies. Their methods of using literary fiction and their own creative writing to intervene in critique and propose alternatives suggest meaningful and inspirational uses of literature that English academics tend to miss or dismiss. My aim is to consider how we as academics and as citizens might engage our imaginations to think economics and our institutions differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]