Abstract
This dissertation’s principal claim is that 1970s United States literature shows that value exceeds contemporaneous political and technological attempts to re-entrench money as the US’s organizing metric. Instead, literary scenes that locate value in people, places, and the generative relationships between them function as a rejection of any such efforts to confine value in the standardized containers of currency and derivative contracts. My close readings of a range of fiction, poetry, essays, and journalism indicate that these scenes of value transfer are carefully choreographed to show, in terms readers can visualize, how value moves between people’s bodies and places’ constituent entities. By situating value so definitively in sites other than money, 1970s US literature constitutes a mosaic of alternatives to what was unfolding throughout the decade: transformations in monetary policy, information technology, and financial markets—from new forms of calculus and derivative products to the dissolution of the gold standard and the launch of the Nasdaq automated price quotation network. 1970s US literature illustrates the variety of physical motions through which value moves beyond the oscillations of more/less, buy/sell, and exercise/expire, the binary pathways to which money and financial products are restricted by the shape of value transfer architecture built to rapidly move standardized units.