Bureaucratic Fiction
Narratives, Images, and Affects of Administration in Contemporary World Literature and Film (B-FILES)
© Alexandra Irimia

Bureaucratic Fiction

Narratives, Images, and Affects of Administration in Contemporary World Literature and Film (B-FILES)

AvH_Logo_Support_RGB.jpg
© Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung

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. 

image2.JPG
© Alexandra Irimia

Keywords

narratology

image studies
affect theory
discourse networks

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

Symposium

Files, Forms, Fictions: Bureaucracy's Literary Lives from Ledgers to Algorithms

16-17 October 2025 

This international symposium brings together scholars exploring the intersection of bureaucracy and literature across various cultural and historical contexts. The main goal is to open a space for the circulation and exchange of ideas on the literary uses of bureaucratic forms and themes, as well as to sketch synchronic and diachronic comparisons.

Fostering a productive dialogue between researchers at various stages of their careers, with expertise in a variety of national literatures, specific themes, or individual authors, the event doubles as an opportunity to develop or consolidate frameworks for understanding literature’s complex relationship with bureaucratic power, documentation practices, and institutional acts, forms or tools of writing. At the heart of our exploration lies, therefore, the complex interplay between bureaucratic machinery and aesthetic imagination. We invite participants to illustrate their own approaches to how bureaucratic structures, languages, and logics have shaped fictional tropes (visual, textual, affective) while also considering how literature and the arts critique, reimagine, or reproduce administrative systems.

Of particular interest is the study of evolving bureaucratic structures and processes—with their intricate webs of political authority, computational technologies, symbolic markers, embodied experiences, and affective dimensions—which leave unmistakable imprints on contemporary aesthetic forms. We are currently witnessing a moment in which AI, platform capitalism, and data-driven systems reshape both bureaucratic structures and their cultural representations. As the early 21st century continues to accelerate the transition from paper-based recordkeeping to digital governance, we deem it important to look back at the fictional instantiations of 19th- and 20th-century models of administration for a better grasp of emergent forms of bureaucratic imagery and imagination.

Talks, Conferences, Presentations (upcoming)

Talks, Conferences, Presentations (past)

  • April 3, 2025: "Archive Fever and Other Symptoms of Bureaucratic Malaise: Pathologies of Public Office in 20th and 21st Century Dystopian Novels” – Workshop: Dystopian Narratives and Stories about Illness, CAPONEU9, Nicosia, Cyprus;
  • November 20, 2024: “Bureaucratic Fiction: Narratives, Images, and Affects of Administration in Contemporary Literature and Film” – Humboldt Network Meeting10, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany;
  • October 3, 2024: “Vers une esthétique de la bureaucratie : le ‘grotesque administratif’ de Michel Foucault et ses avatars contemporains”. Rencontres doctorales – Centre Michel Foucault11, IMEC-Abbaye d’Ardenne, Caen, France;
  • June 6, 2024: “Bureaucracies of Memory. Institutionalized History in Four Contemporary European Novels”. Workshop: European Centres and Peripheries in the Political Novel12, CAPONEU, ZfL Berlin, Germany.

© Alexandra Irimia

Sign up to Bureaucritics

Substack newsletter with scholarship and art engaging with bureaucracy, created in collaboration with Jonathan Foster (Stockholm University).

Instagram

Follow us for newsletter updates, stories about officialdom, and the strangely compelling world of its research.

Researcher's Profile

Dr. Alexandra Irimia

Humboldt Research Fellow

ORCiD1

LinkedIn17

Research Gate

Google Scholar18

Read More

ICLA First Book Prize

Alexandra Irimia's monograph Figures of Radical Absence19 (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 Novel21 (June 2024) is available on the CAPONEU22 project website.

Book Presentation

Alexandra Irimia contributed with an entry on Robert Menasse's Die Hauptstadt [The Capital] to the database of European political novels24 established by CAPONEU - The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe22, an ongoing research project hosted by ZfL Berlin25. 

Links

  1. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1903-6607
  2. https://www.iglk.uni-bonn.de/de/institut/abteilungen/neuere-deutsche-literaturwissenschaft/personal/professorinnen-und-professoren/kerstin-stuessel
  3. https://www.ephemeralnetwork.com/
  4. https://www.avldigital.de/en/networking/details/callforpapers/acts-of-writing-cultural-practices-knowledge-construction-authorship/
  5. https://www.acla.org/program-guide#/search/seminar/47860
  6. https://www.romanistik.uni-bonn.de/romanistik-bonn/aktuelles/ringvorlesung-italien-pop-popkultur-popliteratur-dienstags-18-20-uhr
  7. https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/222330
  8. https://www.iglk.uni-bonn.de/de/veranstaltungen-archiv/bonner-literatur-und-kulturwissenschaftliches-kolloquium/bureaucratic-fiction-aesthetic-regimes-of-administration
  9. https://www.caponeu.eu/news/workshop-political-novel-in-europe-and-migration-exile
  10. https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/vernetzen/veranstaltungskalender/netzwerktagung
  11. https://centremichelfoucault.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Rencontres-doctorales-Centre-Michel-Foucault-IMEC-2-4-oct.-2024.pdf
  12. https://www.zfl-berlin.org/event/european-centers-and-peripheries-in-the-political-novel.html
  13. https://bureaucritics.substack.com/
  14. https://www.instagram.com/bureaucritics/
  15. https://bureaucritics.substack.com/p/latest-in-bureaucriticism
  16. https://bureaucritics.substack.com/p/artministration
  17. https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandrairimia/
  18. https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=hSrrI1YAAAAJ&hl=en
  19. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111150581/html
  20. https://www.ailc-icla.org/ecare-first-book-subvention-prize-winners/
  21. https://www.caponeu.eu/cdp/events/european-centres-and-peripheries-in-pn
  22. https://www.caponeu.eu/
  23. https://caponeu.eu/cdp/materials/alexandra-irimia-bureaucracies-of-memory-institutionalized-history-in-four-contemporary-european-novels-stephen-shapiro-response-to-alexandra-irimia
  24. https://www.caponeu.eu/cdp/novels
  25. https://www.zfl-berlin.org/zfl-english.html
  26. https://caponeu.eu/cdp/novels/die-hauptstadt