Associate Professor
608-263-3785
dazimmerman@wisc.edu
PhD, University of California, Berkeley 2000
M.Ed., George Washington University, 1992
BA, Yale University, 1986
Nineteenth-century American literature; economic fiction; moral philosophy; consent theory; conspiracy and the novel.
Panic! Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
During the economic depression of the 1890s and the speculative frenzy of the following decade, Wall Street, high finance, and market crises assumed unprecedented visibility in the United States. Fiction writers published scores of novels in the period that explored this new cultural phenomenon. In Panic!, David A. Zimmerman studies how American novelists and their readers imagined--and in one case, incited--market crashes and financial panics.
Panic! examines how Americans' attitudes toward securities markets, popular investment, and financial catastrophe were entangled with their conceptions of gender, class, crowds, corporations, and history. Zimmerman investigates how writers turned to mob psychology, psychic investigations, and conspiracy discourse to understand not only how financial markets worked, but also how mass acts of financial reading, including novel reading, could trigger economic disaster and cultural chaos. In addition, Zimmerman shows how, by concentrating on markets in crisis, novelists were able to explore the limits of fiction's aesthetic, economic, and ethical capacities. With readings of canonical as well as lesser-known novelists, Zimmerman provides an original and wide-ranging analysis of the relation between fiction and financial modernity.
For more information about Panic!, go to www.uncpress.unc.edu.
"The Financier and the Ends of Accounting." Dreiser
Studies 35 (Winter 2004): 3-28 [2004 Dreiser Essay Prize Winner]
"Frank Norris, Market Panic, and the
Mesmeric Sublime." American
Literature 75 (March 2003): 61-90.
"Mark Twain, 'Hadleyburg,' and the Performance
of Redemption." ESQ 48 (4th Quarter) 2002: 274-98.
"Six Degrees of Distinction: Connection,
Contagion, and the Aesthetics of Anything." Arizona
Quarterly 55 (Autumn 1999): 107-133. Repr. Drama
Criticism 20 (June 2003): 142-55.
Infectious Designs: Conspiracy and Complicity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature studies representations of conspiracy and conspiracy thinking in American fiction between 1790 and 1910. It examines how conspiracy representations served as an important resource by which Americans mapped the source and scope of moral complicity in the nineteenth century.
"Counterfeits, Passers, and Posers" (a.k.a. Introduction to American and British Literature before 1900); "Monsters and Ghosts" (a.k.a. Introduction to American and British Literature before 1900); "Enchanted Objects" (a.k.a. Introduction to American and British Literature after 1900); "Misfits and Mass Culture" (a.k.a. Introduction to Modern American Literature); "The American Novel before 1914"; "American Literary Naturalism"; "American Literary Gothic"; "Crane, London, Dreiser"; "Wharton, Jewett, Norris"; "Modern American Literature and the Scripting of Everyday Life." Graduate seminars: "Conspiracy and 19th-Century American Literature"; "American Literature and the Marketplace before 1914."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow; Don DeLillo, White Noise; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby