ABSTRACT
As a professor of literature, the author is delighted with former US President Barack Obama’s celebration of literature as his inspiration for a career in politics or, for that matter, for any career involving public service or active engagement with public life. Obama, here, takes particular pride in recognizing literature’s role in teaching empathy. In a complex economy like our own, empathy is a construction that underlies transactional relations not only with strangers, but also with invisible and unknown abstract market interactors. As exemplified in “A Biography of a Bad Shilling,” empathy relied similarly on such techniques of realism that invoked “imaginative writers’ tendency to mine contemporary financial events for characters and plots” in order to create a tolerance for such new financial instruments that made real value out of fictional representations of value, conferred through producing familiarity with unfamiliar and fictionalized others.
