Over the last two centuries, artists, critics, philosophers and theorists have contributed significantly to such representations of "the economy" as sublime. It might even be said that much of the emergence of a distinctly "modern" art in the West is inextricably linked to the perception of art’s own autonomy and, therefore, its privileged, mostly critical, gaze at the terrible mixture of wonder and horror of capitalist economic practices and institutions. The premise of this collection is that despite this perceptual sharing, "sublime economy" has yet to be investigated in a purely cross-disciplinary way. Sublime Economy seeks to map this critical territory by exploring the ways diverse concepts of economy and economic value have been culturally constituted and disseminated through modern art and cultural practice. Comprising of 14 individual essays along with an editors’ introduction, Sublime Economy draws together work from some of the leading scholars in the several fields currently exploring the intersection of economic and aesthetic practices and discourses. A pressing issue of this cross-disciplinary conversation is to discern how artists’, writers’, and cultural scholars’ constructions of distinct conceptions of economic value, as pertains to aesthetic objects as well as to more "everyday" objects and relations of mass consumption, have contributed to the ways "value" functions in and across disparate discourses. Thus this book looks at how cultural critics and theorists have put forward working notions of economic value that have regularities and effects similar to those of the "expert" conceptions and discourses about value that have been the preserve of professional economists.

The Patagonian Sublime provides a vivid, accessible, and cutting-edge investigation of the green economy and New Left politics in Argentina. Based on extensive field research in Glaciers National Park and the mountain village of El Chaltén, Marcos Mendoza deftly examines the diverse social worlds of alpine mountaineers, adventure trekkers, tourism entrepreneurs, seasonal laborers, park rangers, land managers, scientists, and others involved in the green economy. Mendoza explores the fraught intersection of the green economy with the New Left politics of the Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner governments. Mendoza documents the strategies of capitalist development, national representation, and political rule embedded in the “green productivist” agenda pursued by Kirchner and Fernández. Mendoza shows how Andean Patagonian communities have responded to the challenges of community-based conservation, the fashioning of wilderness zones, and the drive to create place-based monopolies that allow ecotourism destinations to compete in the global consumer economy.

Focusing on works by Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy, and Don DeLillo, Joseph Tabbi finds that a simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from technology has produced a powerful new mode of modern writing—the technological sublime.

Interpreting the myths of the digital age: why we believed in the power of cyberspace to open up a new world. The digital era promises, as did many other technological developments before it, the transformation of society: with the computer, we can transcend time, space, and politics-as-usual. In The Digital Sublime, Vincent Mosco goes beyond the usual stories of technological breakthrough and economic meltdown to explore the myths constructed around the new digital technology and why we feel compelled to believe in them. He tells us that what kept enthusiastic investors in the dotcom era bidding up stocks even after the crash had begun was not willful ignorance of the laws of economics but belief in the myth that cyberspace was opening up a new world. Myths are not just falsehoods that can be disproved, Mosco points out, but stories that lift us out of the banality of everyday life into the possibility of the sublime. He argues that if we take what we know about cyberspace and situate it within what we know about culture—specifically the central post-Cold War myths of the end of history, geography, and politics—we will add to our knowledge about the digital world; we need to see it "with both eyes"—that is, to understand it both culturally and materially.After examining the myths of cyberspace and going back in history to look at the similar mythic pronouncements prompted by past technological advances—the telephone, the radio, and television, among others—Mosco takes us to Ground Zero. In the final chapter he considers the twin towers of the World Trade Center—our icons of communication, information, and trade—and their part in the politics, economics, and myths of cyberspace.