“Tell Me a Story”: How American Capitalism Reinvents Itself Through Storytelling

Abstract

The relationship between capitalism and fiction in the United States has always been essentially antagonistic. Yet, American capitalism is reinventing itself today by infiltrating the realm of emotions through the increased use of storytelling, a practice which has now become common in all major firms.

This chapter accounts for this new twist in the history of American capitalism, in which the poet is no longer an anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist or the man of vision a criminal. Instead, they are all glorified and instrumentalized by an economic system which has understood how the world of fiction can be harnessed to capture consumers’ attention, fight disenchantment and build respectability.