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The Madoff Morality Play: Scenes from an American Tragedy

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The spectacular revelation in December 2008 of Bernard L. Madoff’s $64 billion Ponzi scheme sparked an explosion of auto/biographical writing. The books emerging from the scandal include several criminal biographies by noted journalists, Erin Arvedlund and Alexandra Roth’s compilation of testimonies from Madoff’s victims, Harry Markopolos’s account of his nine-year investigation into Madoff’s operations, and Stephanie Madoff Mack’s memoir about her marriage to Madoff’s son Mark, who committed suicide in December 2010. This talk presents these various texts as components of a social drama through which U.S. audiences engage the contradictions of American-style neoliberal capitalism, and it argues that the moral outrage directed at Madoff simultaneously entails and disavows a cathartic recognition of complicity in an inherently unstable and undemocratic socioeconomic system.

John David Zuern is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and Co-Editor of the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. His recent publications include an article on the electronic novel Inanimate Alice in Studia Neophilologica (2014) and chapter on animated poetry in Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era (2013). He is currently editing a special issue of Biography, “Online Lives 2.0,” with Laurie McNeill, and he is working on a book about American life writing in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
(808) 956-3774, biograph@hawaii.edu,