@article{THESIS,
      recid = {12914},
      author = {Tucker, Trevor},
      title = {Seeing Things As They Are: Money and Art in Zola and Henry  James},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2024-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {This dissertation examines the topic of money in relation  to that of aesthetics in the nineteenth-century novel. It  approaches the topic through the work of two roughly  contemporary novelists, Emile Zola and Henry James. Through  readings of representative novels by each, it argues that  represented acts of artistic creation and appreciation, and  careers built on such acts, put into play dynamics found in  modes of economic activity. Investment, speculation,  exploitation, ends-into-means rationality, all find  expression within and surrounding the fictional artistic  careers we examine. The Zola portion examines his “art” and  “money” novels (L’Oeuvre and L’Argent) as a diptych whose  titular subjects serve as analogous vehicles of passion,  twin outlets for an obsession with creation (placed against  images of childbirth) and the quest for personal glory. In  the James portion, we find a turn away from the cult of  creative genius and the pursuit of glory toward a prizing  of patient industry and development in his artist-novels  (Roderick Hudson and The Tragic Muse). By placing uncertain  artistic careers (and even uncertain talents) against the  temptations of wealth and security—temptations which  conceal forms of manipulation and control— these works  present the common Jamesian ethic of renunciation as a  condition for growth. In The Golden Bowl we explore a  hypertrophied faculty of aesthetic valuation applied to  human beings—an application which likewise repeats these  gestures of domination. We find in these works a shared  presentation of the sphere of artistic production and  reception as an arena for the warring impulses of economic  drives, and a use of the fictional space as a laboratory in  which to observe these movements. There emerges out of  these studies a subtle insistence that, in art as in life,  the only viable path forward lies in the assumption of  personal risk, a willingness to expose oneself to failure  and loss.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/12914},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.12914},
}