The coiners of language

by Jean-Joseph Goux

""Is it sheer coincidence that both Gides, uncle and nephew alike - one in the theoretical language of political economy and the other in the language of fiction - are troubled by the same monetary object?""--BOOK JACKET. "With this question, Jean-Joseph Goux turns the theoretical concerns of his earliest works, Economie et symbolique and Les iconoclastes, toward the analysis of modern art and culture. In Goux's The Coiners of Language (originally published in French as Les monnayeurs du langage in 1984), Andre Gide's Counterfeiters appears as an exemplary work of literary modernism, using its title metaphor of monetary fraudulence to question the ground upon which value and meaning are based."--BOOK JACKET.^ ""Was it," Goux asks, "purely by chance that the end of realism in the novel and in painting coincided with the end of gold money? Or that the birth of 'abstract' art coincided with the shocking invention of inconvertible monetary signs?" Through close readings of Gide's novel alo