Philology of the Contemporary World: On Storying the Financial Crisis

The paper examines various approaches to telling the ‘story’ of the financial crisis in the EU and USA after 2007/2008. The idea here, however, is not to thereby try to explain the financial crisis but to understand the preconceptions which attach to telling a ‘story’ – to understand the idea of the ‘story’ itself. The first section of the paper argues that the financial crisis offers a useful case study to this end, since explaining for the ‘ordinary person’ and addressing the ‘general reader’ through stories involved slippages and tensions in this instance. The next section explores such stories in literary, media and academic discourses. The final section makes some consequent inferences on the concept of the ‘story’, suggesting that it is not adequately grasped through philologically-underpinned – specifically narratological – methods