The Aesthetics of Mastery: American Literary Naturalism and the Cultural Foundations of Bureaucracy

• Applicant: Professor Dr. James Dorson
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: from 2013 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 236329866

The cultural perception of bureaucracy in the course of the past century has undergone a radical change. Once considered the panacea for the social ills of industrial capitalism, bureaucracy increasingly became seen as a social malady itself. By the end of the twentieth century, management literature had turned decisively against the rigidly hierarchical models of organization associated with Fordism and toward a greater focus on flexibility and self-management. While emotions and desires were once barred from the workplace as obstacles to efficiency, new so-called post-bureaucratic management practices have increasingly seen them as key to enhanced productivity. Although this change has resulted in less stringent forms of social control, it has also engendered new forms of discipline in terms of self-surveillance and the instrumentalization of emotion in the workplace, and it has gone hand in hand with neoliberal deregulatory practices and a pervasive marketization of society.This project aims to shed light on this development by returning to the cultural foundations of bureaucracy in the United States. My premise is that in response to rising economic inequality and social turmoil around the turn of the twentieth century, writers associated with American literary naturalism sought new ways to represent and deal with the crisis of their times that ultimately served to reorientate their culture to the dawning bureaucratic ethos of the Progressive Era. I wish to examine how this was accomplished through the use of scientific discourse and narrative strategies of control that so far have received little critical attention. At the same time, however, the naturalist redefinition of selfhood from socially anchored in the Victorian moral order to determined by unruly psychobiological processes at once posed a problem to and a new challenge for the rational management of society. If the rationalistic orientation of naturalist fiction helped give cultural legitimacy to early bureaucratic practices of control, then the representation of uncontrollable instincts and emotions in naturalism could also be seen to presage the recent emotional turn of management thought. Thus relocating the cultural origins of the post-Fordist transformation of bureaucracy from where it is commonly sought in the 1960s counterculture to the first cultural manifestations of the bureaucratic outlook in writers like Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser, this project aims both to provide a new perspective on American literary naturalism and to reassess the relationship between literature and organizational culture in the twentieth century.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants