Paper Pushers and Ink Suckers: Objectifying the Administrative Subject in Bureaucratic Fiction
Description
The mundane objects of office life—typewriters, filing cabinets, rubber stamps, corridors—function as more than mere background in literary representations of bureaucracy. From the “ronds-de-cuir” of Georges Courteline’s 1893 satirical bureaucrats to the “chupatintas” of Latin American administrative fiction to be found in Roberto Mariani’s Cuentos de la oficina (1925), writers across cultures have deployed office paraphernalia as both material reality and metaphorical framework for exploring the dehumanizing mechanisms of modern administrative systems. This panel investigates how authors worldwide use workplace objects to critique, reimagine, and resist bureaucratic power structures, transforming clerks into “pen/paper pushers” and reducing human agency to the mechanical repetition of administrative tasks.
We invite papers that examine office paraphernalia through multiple theoretical and cultural lenses:
Material Culture and Administrative Power: How do objects like staplers, typewriters, and filing systems become instruments of control and/or resistance? Papers might explore the evolution from mechanical to digital office technologies, examining how authors represent the changing relationship between human labor and administrative machinery.
Spatial Politics of the Office: The office as literary space—from the protective “womb” of bureaucratic routine to the devouring institutional body. We encourage analysis of inside/outside dynamics, hierarchical spatial arrangements, and the literary representation of corridors, cubicles, and executive suites as sites of class and gender negotiation.
Transnational Bureaucratic Aesthetics: Comparative approaches to office culture across literary traditions. How do different national literatures deploy similar objects (the typewriter, the file, the rubber stamp) to critique administrative systems? What cultural specificities emerge in representations of clerical labor?
The Clerk’s Body as Capital: Investigations of how administrative subjects are transformed into extensions of office machinery, examining the relationship between human embodiment and bureaucratic function through material objects (office wear, office technologies, desktop staples, ergonomic arrangements, storage facilities and retrieval devices, etc.)
Comparative and transnational approaches are especially but not exclusively encouraged.
Papers may draw upon:
- Material culture studies and thing theory
- Media archaeology and document studies
- Labor studies and workplace literature criticism
- Postcolonial approaches to administrative systems
- Sound studies and the acoustic environment of bureaucracy
- Gender studies and the feminization/masculinization of office work
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Dr. Alexandra Irimia is a postdoctoral Humboldt Fellow working on contemporary bureaucratic fiction in world literature and film at the Institute for German, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Bonn (IGLK). Before joining the IGLK, she held postdoctoral fellowships at the Eric Auerbach Institute in Cologne and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen. In parallel, she is pursuing a second PhD at Western University in Canada.
Speaker Bio
Roland Spalinger studied German Literature and Philosopy at the University of Zurich and earned my PhD at the University of Bern 2023. My dissertation was published 2025 as Der gute Mensch. Epistemologie und Rhetorik im 18. Jahrhundert. I'm currently a Postdoc Mobility Fellow at UNC Chapel Hill, on leave from my position as "Oberassistent" at the University of Zurich. My habilitation project, Poetics of Administration, examines bureaucratic and cybernetic processes in postwar German literature.
Speaker Bio
Karolin Schäfer studied English and American, German, and Hispanic studies at the University of Kassel, Germany. She holds a position as research assistant in the project “Small-scale sovereignty. Personal forms of domination in everyday life and their representation in the Hispano-American novel of the 20th and 21st century” (2022-2025). Her PhD project investigates the marginalized role of women within the patriarchal structures found in the Latin-American literary office.
Speaker Bio
Brendan Beirne is an Assistant Professor of English at Norco College in Southern California. He holds a Ph.D. in English from New York University and has taught at NYU, Washington University in St. Louis and Palo Verde College.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Jan-Henrik Witthaus is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at the University of Kassel. Germany. Research: representations of social worlds in Latin American novels. DFG-project “Small-scale sovereignty”. Recent Publication in English: „Balcony Scenes. The Balustrade as a Dispositif of Political Power“, in: H. Paul/S. Pritz (eds.), Sentimental State(s): Affective Politics of Order and Belonging, Bielefeld: transcript 2025, 81-104.
Speaker Bio
Rachel H. R. Hunnicutt is a PhD candidate in American Studies at William & Mary. Her dissertation articulates the narrative trope of the “bureaucratic occult,” exploring connections between large organizations as/and anomalous phenomena in US pop culture and public history. Her writing and reviews have appeared in Design Issues, Collections, Journal of Design History, and Winterthur Portfolio. She is an Editorial Assistant at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.
Speaker Bio
Michael Boog is a PhD student at the University of Bern, Switzerland, whose research is
informed by contemporary world literary theory. His SNSF Doc.CH-funded project
investigates the role of irrealism in the representation of labor in contemporary Anglophone
novels in contexts as diverse as Abu Dhabi and Zambia. He has an MA from the University of
Bern.
Speaker Bio
Heather McNaugher's scholarship includes a paper on dark academia for NEMLA; keynote speaker for The Barbara Pym Society, which published her paper on Crampton Hodnet; and a book chapter on Howards End published in Palgrave Macmillan's Literary Cartographies (ed. Robert Tally). She is author of five poetry monographs and editor of The Fourth River. Her short story chapbook, States of Emergency, won SHR's inaugural Editors’ Prize for Fiction.