Literary theory attempt to meld property law with cultural analysis; mostly flew over my head. As I understand the argument: Slavery, or fugitive slaves, served as a metaphor or playing out of the collapse between concepts of personhood and of property in the 19th century. Fugitivity was also the condition of value in a newly credit-based economy; the fiction that slaves “owed” their masters service also was consistent with the generation of supposedly contractual links between parties that sustained a modern commercial economy. This is somehow connected with racist narratives about black inferiority as well as African-American practices of signifying. Credit and wordplay “share a disdain for the real … Puns break the neck of meaning,” a phrase I liked but am not sure I understand. New legal doctrines condemned “reaping without sowing” in the context of using a celebrity’s identity for commercial purposes without consent, while at the same time speculators in stock/commodities reaped without sowing and, not without contest, became founding figures of the new economy. Metaphors (like reaping without sowing) enable intellectual property to work, but aren’t true of the real world, and thus “[f]orgetting and denial are … the cognitive styles that predominate in intellectual property law.” Mostly I couldn’t make the connections the author seemed to see, though. ( )