Bureaucratic Modernism (edited volume): Call for Papers
Published: 5 September 2025
This edited collection will be the first sustained comparative investigation of bureaucratic modernism across national traditions, administrative regimes, and literary forms.
Bureaucratic Modernism (edited volume): Call for Papers
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.
Please send a 250–500 word abstract and a brief bio (150–300 words)
to bureaucraticmodernism@gmail.com by November 15, 2025.
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.
First published: 5 September 2025