Bureaucratic Fiction
Narratives, Images, and Affects of Administration in Contemporary World Literature and Film (B-FILES)
Bureaucracy is often perceived as dull, monotonous and cumbersome. Then why are stories about bureaucracy so compelling?
Aiming to provide an extensive answer to this question, along with an overview of bureaucratic fiction in contemporary literature and film, this research project led by Dr. Alexandra Irimia1 and hosted by Prof. Kerstin Stüssel2 runs from June 2024 until June 2026, with support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Abstract
B-FILES discusses fictional works engaging with bureaucratic themes and forms as concentrated, multi-layered illustrations of a broader ‘discourse network’ (Kittler) of contemporary administration, characterized by intricate linkages of political and symbolic power, technologies of data storage and encryption, signifying marks, bodies, and affective intensities.
It argues that the processes of regulation and systematization that produce flows of paperwork are not without consequence in the production of contemporary aesthetic forms. Conversely, these processes are always already determined by social imaginaries (Castoriadis) and historical narratives (Foucault) via the production and reception of aesthetic forms.
Finally, the project is an inquiry into the fictional and metafictional implications of logocentric authority, connecting the administrative force of the written record with its aesthetic potentialities.
Keywords
narratology
Goals
- theorize the concept of bureaucratic fiction
- establish a transnational corpus of works for analysis
- examine the social and political implications of fictional representations
- map and historicize bureaucratic fiction
Corpus
- transnational (world literature and cinema)
- set in public or private institutions
- engaging thematically and/or stylistically with institutions, office work, and bureaucratic forms
Research Questions
- How do literature and visual culture engage with the new work realities of the office?
- What contemporary works in world literature and cinema reflect bureaucratic themes and settings?
- What recurrent aesthetic strategies and formal patterns do they deploy?
- What changes if we conceptualize bureaucracy not only as an administrative apparatus, but also as an aesthetic phenomenon, a “discourse network” (Kittler), or an “affective arrangement” (Slaby)?
Methodology
- qualitative, transdisciplinary and multimedia approach
- main frameworks: comparative literature, media theory, cultural analysis
- secondary frameworks: history, political theory, administrative studies, sociology, gender studies
- case study analyses
- synchronic and diachronic comparisons
Results
database, articles, monograph, workshop, newsletter
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Researcher's Profile
Dr. Alexandra Irimia
Humboldt Research Fellow
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ICLA First Book Prize
Alexandra Irimia's monograph Figures of Radical Absence10 (De Gruyter, 2023) received the First Book Subvention Prize from the International Comparative Literature Association.
Working Paper
The working paper "Bureaucracies of Memory. Institutionalized History in Four Contemporary European Novels" presented at the research workshop European Centers and Peripheries in the Political Novel12 (June 2024) is available on the CAPONEU13 project website.
Book Presentation
Alexandra Irimia contributed with an entry on Robert Menasse's Die Hauptstadt [The Capital] to the database of European political novels15 established by CAPONEU - The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe13, an ongoing research project hosted by ZfL Berlin16.
Links
- https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1903-6607
- https://www.iglk.uni-bonn.de/de/institut/abteilungen/neuere-deutsche-literaturwissenschaft/personal/professorinnen-und-professoren/kerstin-stuessel
- https://www.su.se/english/profiles/jofo1519-1.398657
- https://bureaucritics.substack.com/
- https://www.instagram.com/bureaucritics/
- https://bureaucritics.substack.com/p/latest-in-bureaucriticism
- https://bureaucritics.substack.com/p/artministration
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandrairimia/
- https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=hSrrI1YAAAAJ&hl=en
- https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111150581/html
- https://www.ailc-icla.org/ecare-first-book-subvention-prize-winners/
- https://www.caponeu.eu/cdp/events/european-centres-and-peripheries-in-pn
- https://www.caponeu.eu/
- https://caponeu.eu/cdp/materials/alexandra-irimia-bureaucracies-of-memory-institutionalized-history-in-four-contemporary-european-novels-stephen-shapiro-response-to-alexandra-irimia
- https://www.caponeu.eu/cdp/novels
- https://www.zfl-berlin.org/zfl-english.html
- https://caponeu.eu/cdp/novels/die-hauptstadt