Scarcity Poetics: Christian Bök’s Eunoia and the Economics of Literary Value

Christian Bök’s Canadian bestseller Eunoia (2001) is an ideal study in how the romantic notion of literary value actually abides economic theories. Eunoia is a collection of five prose-poems each written using only one vowel grapheme (A, E, I, O, or U). These arbitrary material production constraints work just like economic sanctions, artificially inflating the scarcity—and hence value—of the text, both commercially and literarily. Discourse analysis of surrounding debates reveals that detractions and praises alike abide the same basic supply-and-demand logic: e.g., economic theories of (relative) marginal utility, as applied by Lee Erickson in The Economy of Literary Forms (1996). Building on Erickson’s thesis of how publication media costs shaped literary form and content, on Mary Poovey’s history of literary value’s origin in economic value, and on other efforts to combine literary study with economics, this essay applies economic theory to a rare opportunity to generalize the relation of literary material, form, and content. Conclusively, scarcity poetics/tactics are not just unique to Eunoia, but fundamental to all literary form. Eunoia’s extreme manipulation of linguistic materials isolates the general mechanism by which literary value is produced.