The Global Financial Crisis (2007ff) brought economic phenomena to the center of public attention. The following political shifts and shocks show that unleashed forces of creative destruction (Schumpeter) do more than annihilate economic values, but reach far into all areas of human action, valuation and sense making. In tandem with conflicting scholarly explications and policy suggestions, a wealth of artistic work emerged in reaction to an unraveled, uneven and contradictory global economic reality. This dissertation charts how a transnational body of art grappled with this larger crisis of economic globalization over the ensuing decade. It begins with a critical and historical consideration of the concept of crisis, discussing how dominant economic narratives and theories, and their underlying values and promises, have come into question and failed to articulate any convincing alternative. I argue that the absence of scholarly consensus, and the larger sense of disorientation the Global Financial Crisis instilled in experts and laypeople alike, reveals a fundamental epistemological crisis and highlights the need for theoretical renewal in examining critical economic phenomena. I develop an interdisciplinary approach, departing from Cultural Political Economy to explore the relationship of the aesthetic-cultural production of German and English-language novels, transnational film, and video games to cultural, political, and economic processes of confronting the crisis. Centralizing in-depth analyses of cultural artifacts, I identify aesthetic-cultural production as a privileged site to study the epistemological dimension of the crisis. Accounting for the unique semantic properties of decisively fictional discourses, I define three functions of cultural production. The communicative function explores how cultural production, and its narratives and tropes, can become part of dominant discourses. The critical function examines how different artistic media and their unique formal strategies can develop ambitions to intervene in the process of working through a crisis. Finally, the utopian function investigates how cultural production can serve as a laboratory for a renewal of social imagination, a place to work past an untenable status quo.