ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that literary criticism has resources and perspectives that oppose key premises of Western capitalism. Literary study lacks the kind of research infrastructure assumed by the natural and even the social sciences. In relation to STEM, literature and criticism have been locked in as "lower faculties," denied their Kantian role as interpreters of the conditions of truth. Literary and cultural study (LCS) does not have the funding to do the purchasing and operating of equipment, data collection, regular travel, archiving, visualization, and dissemination that ground empirical research in science and technology fields. Literary knowledge of economy will analyze and express the economy's internal contradictions and incommensurabilities without reducing them to linear or material causalities. Literary knowledge helps people through all the entanglements, and so to explain to someone the economics of our weak recovery—or the Syrian Civil War—you find yourself, pretty soon, speaking some kind of novel.
