"Catastrophic Generic Change: Understanding Global Interconnectedness": A presentation by Mary Poovey April 6, 2009

Mary Poovey is Samuel Rudin University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at New York University. Her latest work is Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2008).

In this lecture, Poovey describes the current financial crisis and argues that regulators need to identify the heart of the problem before they can devise a workable corrective. She suggests that what caused - and now prolongs - the financial crisis is a novel financial instrument - the derivative - that creates new and opaque relationships between parts of the global economy that previously remained distinct. The concept of genre helps us identify and understand derivatives as departures from a norm - and this provides a basis for thinking about how to intervene in this ongoing crisis.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu