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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:18:33 2006 |
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================= HES POSTING ======================
[This query comes via Michael Perelman, who originally received it, and
wondered if anyone here could help. I will post responses and forward
them on to the original inquirer, who is a Ph.D. candidate in English at
UC-Berkeley. -- RBE]
Can you recommend a title or two--or a scholar or two--which will give me
a history of the terms "sympathy" and "sentiment" as they're used in
market discourse today? I'm assuming they come out of the tradition of
moral sentiments as adumbrated in Smith and Hume. The dozens of volumes
on "sentiment" and "sympathy" in American literary scholarship don't
mention the terms' common usage in the stock and commodities markets. My
particular interest is in moments when "sentiment" and "sympathy"--in
American fiction, typically virtuous, humanizing, feminizing moments of
identification or empathy or consensus between individuals--become
pathological and catastrophic, as in market panics. In short, I'm trying
to figure out what the relation between economic writers' usage of the
terms and fiction and reform writers' usage of the terms was in the U.S.
in the 19th century, how two extremely common discourses employed common
terms so differently. They would seem to oppose and confuse each other,
but no scholarship to my knowledge has studied this.
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