Who gets to be the protagonist of work? Why do some forms of labor readily sustain narrative interiority while others appear only as background conditions for someone else's story? This seminar proposes that these questions are inseparable from the infrastructures that organize work and the affects those infrastructures produce. We invite papers that consider how literature and film transform the systems of labor, from the filing cabinet to the fiber-optic cable, into aesthetic form.

Our point of departure is the apparent division between two archives. Office fiction and its screen adaptations narrate white-collar life through buildings, cubicles, paperwork, procedure, and corporate routine, dwelling on boredom as an affective condition. One archive assumes workers already inside institutions worthy of narrative interiority. The other studies workers who appear only through displacement, testimony, or disappearance. Literature and film of the globalized economy trace new aspirations shaped by liberalization, outsourcing, and the promise of white-collar mobility. From call centers and service work to transnational migration and digital labor, these texts follow workers whose desires orient toward an imagined future of corporate success even as their lives remain structured by contracts, precarious employment, and the infrastructures of global communication. Here narrative reworks testimony, the letter home, and the phone call as forms of separation and erasure. Read together, these archives reveal boredom and precarity not as opposing experiences but as different aesthetic responses to a shared global organization of labor.

These archives are starting points, not borders, and the field between them is what we hope this seminar will map. The moment presses the question. As platforms disperse the office, AI promises to automate its paperwork, and logistics stretches supply chains across oceans, the infrastructures of work are being rebuilt in real time, and with them the forms available for narrating a working life. We welcome papers on any literature or film, from any region, language, or period, that takes work as its subject and treats form as evidence: the office as built and bureaucratic space; boredom, burnout, and precarity; the representability of subaltern labor; domestic, care, service, and logistics work; gig economies and automation; unions, brokers, and corporations as narrative actors. We aim to build a sustained, three-session conversation across career stages and labor regimes, with a view toward future publication. Bring us the workers your field has been reading past.