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"I would prefer not to": Routine and Agency in Office Fiction
Series
Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature (SPELL)
ISBN
9783823393276
Type
book section
Date Issued
2019-11
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Heim, Cécile
Vejdovsky, Boris
Pickford, Benjamin
Abstract (De)
In recent years, fiction writers have been increasingly interested in the office as a symbolic setting with which to address the individual’s embeddedness in socio-economic structures. This article focuses on two recurrent motifs in recent office fiction – routine and agency – which are already anticipated in one of the earliest examples of American office fiction: Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivener” (1853). Routine, as a result of doctrines of rational efficiency, highlights the “mechanical,” boring and repetitive nature of industrialized office work and its consequences on human beings. The question of agency and resistance implied in Bartleby’s famous formula, “I would prefer not to,” becomes pressing in a neoliberal context where the transformation of social organizations into corporate businesses generates a totalizing system. The present essay discusses these generic issues - agency and resistance - with particular reference to David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011) and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018).
Language
English
Keywords
Contemporary American fiction; Offic fiction; Working conditions; Agency; Boredom; "Barlteby
the Scrivener"; David Foster Wallace; Ling Ma
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
Book title
The Genres of Genre: Form, Formats, and Cultural Formations
Publisher
Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Publisher place
Tübingen
Volume
38
Start page
65
End page
84
Pages
175
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Contact Email Address
sixta.quassdorf@unisg.ch
References
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Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener. A story of Wall Street.” 1853. Pierre or, The Ambiguities, Israel Potter. His Fifty Years of Exile, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man. His Masquerade, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Ed. Harrison Hayford. The Library of America, 1984, pp. 635-72.
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Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. 1951. Oxford UP, 2002.
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Norman, Matthew. Domestic Violets. Harper Perennial, 2011.
Park, Ed. Personal Days. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2008.
Perkins, David. Is Literary History Possible? Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
Pham, Larissa. “The Business of Survival – Ling Ma’s Disaster Fiction.” The Nation, 2 October 2018, n.p. https://www.thenation.com/article/the-business-of-survival/. Accessed 29 October 2018.
Philipps, Helen. The Beautiful Bureaucrat. Henry Holt, 2015.
Rowland, Amy. The Transcriptionist. Algonquin Books, 2014.
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Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. “Literary Genres and Textual Genericity.” The Future of Literary Theory. Ed. Ralph Cohen. Routledge, 1989, pp. 167-87.
Schaub, Michael. “In ‘Severance,’ The World Ends Not With A Bang, But A Memo.” National Public Radio, 19 August 2018, n.p. https://www.npr.org/2018/08/19/639251266/in-severance-the-world-ends-not-with-a-bang-but-a-memo. Accessed 29 October 2018.
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Shapiro, Ari. “In Satirical ‘Severance,’ A Stricken Country Works Itself To Death.” National Public Radio, 10 August 2018, n.p. https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=637473748. Accessed 12 November 2018.
Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. Hill and Wang, 1982.
Wallace, David Foster. The Pale King. Little, Brown and Co, 2011.
Weber, Max. Essays in Sociology. 1925. Oxford UP, 1946.
Whitehead, Colson. Zone One. Doubleday, 2011.
Whyte, William H. The Organization Man. 1956. U of Pennsylvania P, 2002.
Williams, Jeffrey J. “The Rise of the Academic Novel.” American Literary History, vol. 24, no. 3, 2012, pp. 561-89.
Wouters, Conley. “‘What Am I, a Machine?’: Humans, Information, and Matters of Record in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 44, no.4, 2012, pp. 447-63.
Yen, Anna. Sophia of Silicon Valley. William Morrow (HarperCollins), 2018.
Agamben, Giorgio. “Bartleby, or, On, Contingency.” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford UP, 1999, pp. 243-271.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 1951. Harvest Book, 1985.
Baldick, Chris, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Online (4 ed.). Oxford UP, 2015, n.p.
Bedore, Pamela. “Understanding Popular Literature – What Does ‘Genre’ Mean?” The Great Courses Daily, 26 October 2018, n.p. https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/understanding-popular-literature-what-does-genre-mean/. Accessed 1 May 2019.
Berebitsky, Julie. Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire. Yale UP, 2012.
Bernes, Jasper. “Character, Genre, Labor: The Office Novel After Deindustrialization.” Post45, vol. 1, 2019, n.p. http://post45.research.yale.edu/2019/01/character-genre-labor-the-office-novel-after-deindustrialization/. Accessed 21 January 2019.
Biederman, Sam. “The Company Way.” Idiom, 20 February 2010, n.p. http://idiommag.com/2010/02/the-company-way/. Accessed 6 March 2018.
Boswell, Marshall. “Preface.” David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing.” Ed. Marshall Boswell. Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. vi-xii.
Burrough, Bryan. “Workplace Fiction That’s True to Life.” New York Times, 17 April 2011, p. BU5.
Clare, Ralph. “The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 44, no. 4, 2012, pp. 428–46.
Cohen, Elizabeth. The Glitch. Doubleday, 2018.
Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975.
den Dulk, Allard. “Boredom, Irony, and Anxiety: Wallace and the Kierkegaardian View of the Self.” David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing.” Ed. Marshall Boswell. Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 43-60.
DeWitt, Helen. Lightning Rods. New Directions, 2011.
Dobson, Joanne. “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature.” American Literature, vol. 69, no. 2, 1997, pp. 263-88.
Dorson, James. “Cormac McCarthy and the Genre Turn in Contemporary Literary Fiction.” Special Issue of European Journal of American Studies: Cormac McCarthy Between Worlds, vol. 12, no. 3, 2017, n.p. https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/12291#entries. Accesses 30 May 2019.
Egan, Elisabeth. A Window Opens. Simon and Schuster, 2015.
Eggers, Dave. The Circle. Knopf, 2013.
Ferris, Joshua. Then We Came to the End. Penguin Books, 2007.
Flanders, Judith. “Why don’t novels ‘do’ work?” The Guardian, 30 March 2009, n.p. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/mar/30/work-novels-fiction-flanders. Accessed 9 October 2018.
Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Clarendon Press, 1987.
Frow, John. Genre. Routledge, 2015.
Giles, Paul. “Sentimental Posthumanism: David Foster Wallace.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 53, no. 3, 2007, pp. 327-44.
Goodman, Robert. “Ling Ma Severance.” The Newtown Review of Books, 25 October 2018, n.p. https://newtownreviewofbooks.com.au/ling-ma-severance-reviewed-by-robert-goodman/. Accessed 13 November 2018.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1927. Harper Perennial, 2008.
Heller, Joseph. Something Happened. Knopf, 1974.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1944. Verso Classics, 2010.
Horkheimer, Max. Eclipse of Reason. 1947. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
Kiesling, Lydia. “The Office Politics of Workplace Fiction by Women.” The New Yorker, 27 July 2016, n.p. www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-office-politics-of-workplace-fiction-by-women. Accessed 12 November 2018.
Lanchester, John. “When fiction breaks down.” The Telegraph, 29 January 2010, n.p. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7093699/When-fiction-breaks-down.html. Accessed 12 November 2018.
Lanzendörfer, Tim. “Introduction.” The Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel. Ed. Tim Lanzendörfer. Lexington Books, 2017, pp. 1-15.
Lindgren, Michael. “The office: Three new books offer a glimpse at the contemporary workplace.” The Washington Post, 10 September 2014, p. C04.
Lindner, Elsbeth. “Review of Severance by Ling Ma.” Bookoxygen, 2018, n.p. http://bookoxygen.com/?p=7973. Accessed 29 October 2018.
Lipsyte, Sam. The Ask. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
Ma, Ling. Severance. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Beacon, 1964.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1. Progress Publishers, 1887. Online edition, 2015. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/. Accessed 9 November 2018.
Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener. A story of Wall Street.” 1853. Pierre or, The Ambiguities, Israel Potter. His Fifty Years of Exile, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man. His Masquerade, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Ed. Harrison Hayford. The Library of America, 1984, pp. 635-72.
Miller, Carolyn R. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 70, 1984, pp. 151-67.
Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. 1951. Oxford UP, 2002.
Mulhall, Anne. “Resistance and Refusal in the New Literature of the Office: Reading Lydie Salvayre's La Vie commune and Delphine de Vigan's Les Heures souterraines.” Conference Paper at Work Stories: Documenting, Narrating and Representing the French Workplace, 15 and 16 April 2016. Institute of Modern Languages Research, Senate House, University of London. n.p. http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/6418/. Accessed 31 October 2018.
Norman, Matthew. Domestic Violets. Harper Perennial, 2011.
Park, Ed. Personal Days. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2008.
Perkins, David. Is Literary History Possible? Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
Pham, Larissa. “The Business of Survival – Ling Ma’s Disaster Fiction.” The Nation, 2 October 2018, n.p. https://www.thenation.com/article/the-business-of-survival/. Accessed 29 October 2018.
Philipps, Helen. The Beautiful Bureaucrat. Henry Holt, 2015.
Rowland, Amy. The Transcriptionist. Algonquin Books, 2014.
Saval, Nikil. “Bartlebys All!” Dissent, vol. 61, no.4, 2014, pp. 22–26.
Saval, Nikil. Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. Doubleday, 2014.
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. “Literary Genres and Textual Genericity.” The Future of Literary Theory. Ed. Ralph Cohen. Routledge, 1989, pp. 167-87.
Schaub, Michael. “In ‘Severance,’ The World Ends Not With A Bang, But A Memo.” National Public Radio, 19 August 2018, n.p. https://www.npr.org/2018/08/19/639251266/in-severance-the-world-ends-not-with-a-bang-but-a-memo. Accessed 29 October 2018.
Sewell, William H. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 98, no. 1, 1992, pp. 1–29.
Shapiro, Ari. “In Satirical ‘Severance,’ A Stricken Country Works Itself To Death.” National Public Radio, 10 August 2018, n.p. https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=637473748. Accessed 12 November 2018.
Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. Hill and Wang, 1982.
Wallace, David Foster. The Pale King. Little, Brown and Co, 2011.
Weber, Max. Essays in Sociology. 1925. Oxford UP, 1946.
Whitehead, Colson. Zone One. Doubleday, 2011.
Whyte, William H. The Organization Man. 1956. U of Pennsylvania P, 2002.
Williams, Jeffrey J. “The Rise of the Academic Novel.” American Literary History, vol. 24, no. 3, 2012, pp. 561-89.
Wouters, Conley. “‘What Am I, a Machine?’: Humans, Information, and Matters of Record in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 44, no.4, 2012, pp. 447-63.
Yen, Anna. Sophia of Silicon Valley. William Morrow (HarperCollins), 2018.
Eprints ID
258173