American Literature for Economics Major

This showcase presents the very best examples of students' projects in “Theodore Dreiser in International Perspective” course taught by Dr. Ashley Squires at the Joint HSE NES undergraduate program

 

Ashley Squires

Assistant Professor of Humanities and Languages, New Economic School

The methodologies you will see here are extremely diverse and interdisciplinary. Anastasia Gonotskaya uses game theory to analyze the decisions made by characters during a key episode in Dreiser’s The Financier. Other papers attempt to examine how American authors have been received in Russia and to get at why that reception took the form that it did. Maxim Alekseev relies primarily on elite opinions from the Soviet era to examine the politics behind Soviet analysis of Jack London’s Martin Eden. Ilya Markin and Vladislav Pismenskiy, on the other hand, look at popular, contemporary reception. Using online reviews from Goodreads and Livelib as a source of data, both examine the financial attitudes that modern readers bring to The Financier. Markin approaches this from the perspective of financial literacy while Pismenskiy ponders the question of why Russian readers tend to view The Financier as a piece of motivational literature while English-language readers, by and large, do not.

Projects Reviews:

Maxim Alekseev's essay, "Martin Eden: The Soviet Perspective," offers compelling commentary on Jack London's novel and its meaning within the context of contemporary philosophical and aesthetic debates. In doing so, Alexeev reveals a conundrum in the way both U.S. and Soviet critics misinterpreted the position London expressed on socialism and individualism in Martin Eden . His treatment of the novel's reception in the U.S.S.R. provides an especially interesting glimpse at how Soviet critics navigated through the politicized discourse of the time in their sometimes Aesopian elucidations of the text. As such, it is worthwhile reading for anyone interested in Jack London's reception in Russia or in the critical discourse around Western literature in the Soviet Union. 
Ivan Eubanks, Acting Dean of Academic Affairs, University College of the Cayman Islands, Editor in Chief, «Pushkin Review / Пушкинский вестник»

Judging the financial literacy of readers of The Financier by Ilya Markin
Ilya Markin’s essay is not in fact about Dreiser’s “The Financier” – a novel written in the beginning of the XXth century. Through the prism of “The Financier” Ilya looks at how our contemporaries view financial industry and its people. This view turns out to be full of misconceptions and errors. Ilya shows how ordinary people (not trained economists) still view finance professionals as adventurous gold diggers and finance as a complicated game for the privileged few. Ilya’s simple case study raises an important issue for the economists and educators: the enormous importance of finance for the modern economy demands financial literacy from every member of the society, and in this regard our education system is lacking. 
Tatyana Mikhailova, assistant professor at Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Moscow, Russia

Vladislav Pismenskiy's essay, "The International Reception of Theodore Dreiser's The Financier", delivers an interesting explanation for how the novel in question has a unique appeal for Russians, in comparison with Western readers. Despite his questionable morals, the main character of The Financier , Frank Cowperwood, is widely viewed as a positive figure in Russia, accoding to Pismenskiy, because the novel fills a gap left by the fact that motivational literature never developed as a genre in that country. Basing his analysis on reviews written by consumers on popular websites, Pismenskiy shows that Western readers interpret The Financier not as a fictional surrogate for motivational literature but more as a morality tale about the dangers of unchecked ambition in a capitalist society. Meanwhile, Russians see moral ambiguity in Cowperwood, whose behavior may be construed as in keeping with the social contract (which may or may not be flawed in and of itself). Thus Pismesnkiy delivers an insightful discussion of Dreiser's novel to anyone interested in it or its reception in Russia. 
Ivan Eubanks, Acting Dean of Academic Affairs, University College of the Cayman Islands, Editor in Chief, «Pushkin Review / Пушкинский вестник»

Applying Game Theory to Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier by Anastasia Gonotskaya

In her essay Anastasia  Gonotskaya builds a number of game theoretic models around Theodor Dreiser's novel "The financier". Her work shows careful analysis of the novel's plot; the models which Anastasia present are reasonable and their solutions she finds are correct within the models. Perhaps one major deviation from orthodox game theory is explicitly made assumptions that agents' beliefs do not correspond to the reality (and hence equilibria cannot be formalized as, for example, Bayes Nash equilibria of a game with incomplete information); with this assumption I would not call the agents "perfectly rational", but this is a matter of definitions.
Andrei Bremzen, Vice Principal, School #57, Moscow, Russia

 

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