Performing Economic Thought
Performing Economic Thought
This introductory chapter presents an approach for analysing mercantile treatises and early English drama based on the work of Michel Serres and Bruno Latour. It compares this approach to new economic criticism, new historicism, and cognitive approaches to theatre. It summarises the book's argument that seventeenth-century mercantile treatises aspired to be transparent windows onto a world of objective truth, whereas plays showed totalising representations of economic activity to be self-evidently discursive constructs. Plays drew attention to the tension between framing and overflowing, between the aspects of the world internalised by particular representation of commerce and those aspects that appear as externalities. The author terms the array of techniques by which playwrights could use the stage to create and interrogate models of commercial activity in its systemic totality a ‘mercantile dramaturgy.’
Keywords: cognitive approaches to theatre, externalities, framing, new economic criticism, overflowing, Bruno Latour, new historicism, mercantile dramaturgy, mercantile treatises, Michel Serres
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