"Is it sheer coincidence that both Gides, uncle and nephew alike -- one in the theoretical language of political economy and the other in the language of fiction -- are troubled by the same monetary object?" With this question, Jean-Joseph Goux turns the theoretical concerns of his earliest works, Economie et symbolique and Les iconoclastes, toward the analysis of modern art and culture. In Goux's "The Coiners of Language" (originally published in French as Les monnayeurs du langage in 1984), Andre Gide's Counterfeiters appears as an exemplary work of literary modernism, using its title metaphor of monetary fraudulence to question the ground upon which value and meaning are based. In the second part of the book, Goux examines the same configuration of symbols in the work of Stephane Mallarme, Paul Valery, Ferdinand de Saussure, and other writers and exposes the instability already beginning to undermine the realism of Hugo and Zola. Jean-Joseph Goux is one of the major critical and theoretical figures to have emerged from the pioneering Tel Quel group of the late 1960s. His first two books, combined and translated by Jennifer Curtiss Gage as Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud (1990), constituted a highly original and influential reflection on cultural history and theory. With "The Coiners of Language", Gage makes Goux's most accessible work available to an English-speaking audience. "Goux's is an admirable book for the wide range of positions he incorporates into the problem of money and literature". -- Modern Language Notes.
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