Bureaucratic Modernism

Edited by Alexandra Irimia and Jonathan Foster

Both modernist literature and modern bureaucracy reshaped how societies imagined authority, individuality, and the written word. Modernist authors not only depicted bureaucracy—they absorbed and transformed its textual forms, procedural rhythms, and rationalized aesthetics. This volume takes that convergence as its starting point, asking how the rise of administrative culture in the early twentieth century influenced modernist style, and how modernist experimentation in turn reframed the experience of bureaucracy.

Recent scholarship has explored the interplay between literature and bureaucracy across disciplines, from public administration studies to the anthropology of bureaucracy (Wild 2006; Corngold & Wagner 2011; Sullivan 2013; Robinson 2019). Modernism has emerged as a particularly fertile site for this inquiry: writers such as Constantine P. Cavafy, T. S. Eliot, Lygia Fagundes Telles, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Flann O’Brien, Graciliano Ramos, Wallace Stevens, and Paul Valéry worked within bureaucratic institutions, making office work both a lived reality and a creative resource. Studies have traced themes of impersonality, repetition, and delay; examined bureaucratic genres such as reports and registers; and considered the ways administrative rationality shaped modernist form (Bishop 2016; Hentea 2022; Telfer 2023). Yet the field of “bureaucratic modernism” remains underexplored, especially in its transnational and non-Western dimensions, its formal innovations, and its mutual shaping of administrative culture and aesthetic practice.

This edited collection will be the first sustained comparative investigation of bureaucratic modernism across national traditions, administrative regimes, and literary forms. We seek to understand:

• how bureaucratic textuality and organizational culture influenced modernist aesthetics.

• how modernist techniques (fragmentation, circularity, deferral) resonate with bureaucratic forms of knowledge and control.

• how colonial, postcolonial, and global bureaucracies shaped—and were shaped by—modernist writing.

By situating modernism within the wider history of administration, we also hope to shed light on our own moment, marked by the digitization of bureaucratic processes and the resurgence of bureaucratic themes in contemporary literature and art.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Representations of bureaucratic environments, processes, and personnel in modernist literature.

• Bureaucratic genres (reports, registers, memos) as literary or poetic resources.

• Impersonality, repetition, and delay in bureaucratic and modernist textualities.

• Modernism and Max Weber’s theory of bureaucratic authority.

• Colonial and postcolonial bureaucratic modernism.

• The “institutional turn” and its implications for modernist studies.

• Comparative or transnational perspectives on bureaucratic modernism.

• The afterlives of bureaucratic modernism in contemporary literature and art.

Submission details

Please send a 250–500 word abstract and a brief bio (150-300 words) to bureaucraticmodernism@gmail.com by November 15, 2025.

Timeline

Accepted contributors will be invited to submit essays of 6,000–8,000 words by June 1, 2026. Upon successful completion of the revisions following blind peer review, the edited volume will likely be published by De Gruyter Brill, who has already expressed an interest in the project.

Selected bibliography

Bishop, Nicola. “‘Middlebrow “Everyman’ or Modernist Figurehead? Experiencing Modernity through the Eyes of the Humble Clerk.” Middlebrow and Gender, 1890–1945. Edited by Christoph Ehland and Cornelia Wächter. Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016, 101–120.

Corngold, Stanley, and Benno Wagner. Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2011.

de la Motte, Dean. “Writing Fonctionnaires, Functions of Narrative.” L’Esprit Créateur 34.1 (1994): 22–30.

Foster, Jonathan. Writing the State: Administrative Fiction in Long-Nineteenth-Century Britain. PhD Thesis, Stockholm University, 2025.

Foster, Jonathan, and Elliott Mills. “Bureaucratic Poetics: Brian O’Nolan and the Irish Civil Service.” The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies 6.1 (2022): 1–15.

Foster, Jonathan, Alexandra Irimia, and Burkhardt Wolf (eds.). Administrative Cultures and Their Aesthetics. Special issue of Administory: Journal for the History of Public Administration 8.1. (2023).

Hentea, Marius. “Finding the Center: Mrs Dalloway’s Bureaucrats and State Centralization.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 55.2 (2022): 283–304.

Harris, Tobias W. and Joseph LaBine. “John Garvin and Brian O’Nolan in Civil Service: Bureaucratic, Joycean Modernism.” The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies 6.1 (2022): 1-17.

Jenkin-Smith, Daniel. The Rise of Office Literature. Bureaucratization and Aesthetics in Britain and France, 1810-1900. London: Bloomsbury, 2025.

Kafka, Franz, Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg, and Benno Wagner. Franz Kafka: The Office Writings. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Kracauer, Siegfried. The Salaried Masses.Translated by Quintin Hoare. New York: Verso, 1998.

Krause, James R. “Undermining Authoritarianism: Retrofitting the Zombie in ‘Seminário dos ratos’ by Lygia Fagundes Telles.” Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía/Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía 6.1 (2018), Art. 8.

O’Hanlon, Karl. Official Voices: Poets and the Irish State. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2025.

Platt, Adreana Dulcina, Ubaldo Cesar Balthazar and Frederico Augusto Garcia Fernandes. “When Bureaucracy is Literature: the literariness in the reports of Graciliano Ramos.” Educação & Realidade 44.3 e82965, 2019.

Purdon, James. Modernist Informatics: Literature, Information, and the State. Oxford UP, 2015.

Rainey, Lawrence. “Eliot Among the Typists: Writing The Waste Land.” Modernism/modernity 12.1 (2005): 27–84.

Robinson, Benjamin Lewis. Bureaucratic Fanatics: Modern Literature and the Passions of Rationalization. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2019.

Seybold, Matt.“Astride the Dark Horse: T. S. Eliot and the Lloyds Bank Intelligence Department.” The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017, 131–156.

Stüssel, Kerstin. In Vertretung: Literarische Mitschriften von Bürokratie zwischen früher Neuzeit und Gegenwart. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004.

Sullivan, Ceri. Literature in the Public Service: Sublime Bureaucracy. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Telfer, Michaela. “Bureaucratic Modernity: Huysmans as ‘Rond-de-Cuir.’” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 51.3 (2023): 169–184.

West, Emma. “Modern Institutions and the Civilizing Mission.” Modernism/modernity Print Plus 5.2 (2020).

Wild, Jonathan. The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880-1939. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.