Boundaries and the crisis: cultural imaginaries, narratives, and political discourses : Sub-plenary lecture

While the discourse of neo-liberalism has been a privileged area of investigation in critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2012) and cultural studies (Hall) since the 1980s, the dominant cultural scripts and idioms produced, and disseminated, by mediated political representations in order to define the current financial crisis have emerged over the last years as a growing concern in the interconnected domains of political communication, critical theory, critical sociology, media and discourse studies. Recently, these issues have gained increasing circulation and urgency also among scholars in the fields of literary and critical cultural studies (Grossberg), as is demonstrated by the number of conferences, books, and special issues devoted to these themes. Building on such scholarship, this presentation investigates cultural imaginaries, and literary and political narratives of the crisis, according to the interfacing conceptual categories of “boundary-drawing” (and the “trespassing of boundaries”), and representation.