Professor Seybold Posts in LA Review of Books
Elmira, NY (07/31/2018) — Dr. Matt Seybold, assistant professor of American literature & Mark Twain studies, recently published an essay on BLARB, the blog of the Los Angeles Review of Books. The essay is partially a review of a recent documentary, The China Hustle, as well as a reflection on the lasting impact of Michael Lewis's The Big Short, the 2010 bestseller which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 2015. Dr. Seybold argues that The China Hustle and The Big Short are both representative of "a broader cultural defense of short-selling and activist investing that either naively ignores or willfully suppresses the propensity for fraudulence amongst this class of investors." Over the course of the essay, Dr. Seybold traces the origin of the term activist investor, points out how Dan David, a congressional candidate in Pennsylvania, has used The China Hustle as free publicity, and introduces an alternate history of reverse merger fraud in the form of Billions fan fiction.
Seybold says, "I will admit, the mixed genres of film review, reception history, and fan fiction, make it one of the strangest things I've ever written. I started working on it during Term III, when these were all texts in The Culture of Global Recession course. Each of them generated very interesting student responses, but I noticed, in particular, how important The Big Short was to the class. It clearly paves the way for both China Hustle and Billions, and students returned over and over to write about it in their papers and exams. We watched and read dozens of accounts of the 2008 financial crisis, but 90% of students cited The Big Short as their favorite and leaned disproportionately on Lewis's version of events. I wanted to spend a little more time thinking about both why it was so popular and persuasive, and how that popularity informs the historical memory of 2008."
For the full post, please visit https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/eat-shorts-billions-fanfic-review-china-hustle/.
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