Corporate Fictions

Across the novel, theater, film, and television, and across genres and modes, the corporation has served as a key setting for fictionalizations of modern life. This panel aims to create an intermedial, intergeneric, and historically comparative conversation between literary and literary-minded scholars interested in the corporation as a representational content and form. Paper foci could include:

—The corporation as a social and formal problem for a particular genre or medium
—Industry-specific concerns (e.g., technology or finance)
—Sub-genres (e.g., the financial thriller)
—Corporations as families / the corporatization of the family
—The relationship between seriality and finance, the commodity, etc.
—The relationship between corporate fiction and the publishing and culture industries
—Information and literary/medial form
—Affects and managed hearts
—The relationship between corporate life and identity categories such as gender, race, sexuality, and ability
—Marxist and sociological literary theory and criticism

Please send a 250-word abstract and a 50-word biography to blake.beaver@duke.edu by March 17, 2025.