Goals

• theorize the concept of bureaucratic fiction
• establish a transnational  corpus of works for analysis
• examine the social and political implications of fictional representations
• map and historicize bureaucratic fiction

Corpus

• transnational (world literature and cinema)
• set in public or private institutions
• engaging thematically and/or stylistically with institutions, office work, and bureaucratic forms

Research Questions

• How do literature and visual culture engage with the new work realities of the office?
• What contemporary works in world literature and cinema reflect bureaucratic themes and settings?
• What recurrent aesthetic strategies and formal patterns do they deploy?
• What changes if we conceptualize bureaucracy not only as an administrative apparatus, but also as an aesthetic phenomenon, a “discourse network” (Kittler), or an “affective arrangement” (Slaby)?

Methodology

• qualitative, transdisciplinary and multimedia approach
• main frameworks: comparative literature, media theory, cultural analysis
• secondary frameworks: history,  political theory, administrative  studies, sociology, gender studies
• case study analyses
• synchronic and diachronic  comparisons

Results

database, articles, monograph, workshop, newsletter

Files, Forms, Fictions:

Literary Lives of Bureaucracy, from Ledgers to Algorithms

October 16^th - 17^th 2025 

Bonn

This international symposium brings together scholars exploring the intersection of bureaucracy and literature across various cultural and historical contexts. The main goal is to open a space for the circulation and exchange of ideas on the literary uses of bureaucratic forms and themes, as well as to sketch synchronic and diachronic comparisons.

Fostering a productive dialogue between researchers at various stages of their careers, with expertise in a variety of national literatures, specific themes, or individual authors, the event doubles as an opportunity to develop or consolidate frameworks for understanding literature’s complex relationship with bureaucratic power, documentation practices, and institutional acts, forms or tools of writing. At the heart of our exploration lies, therefore, the complex interplay between bureaucratic machinery and aesthetic imagination. We invite participants to illustrate their own approaches to how bureaucratic structures, languages, and logics have shaped fictional tropes (visual, textual, affective) while also considering how literature and the arts critique, reimagine, or reproduce administrative systems.

Of particular interest is the study of evolving bureaucratic structures and processes—with their intricate webs of political authority, computational technologies, symbolic markers, embodied experiences, and affective dimensions—which leave unmistakable imprints on contemporary aesthetic forms. We are currently witnessing a moment in which AI, platform capitalism, and data-driven systems reshape both bureaucratic structures and their cultural representations. As the early 21^st century continues to accelerate the transition from paper-based recordkeeping to digital governance, we deem it important to look back at the fictional instantiations of 19^th- and 20^th-century models of administration for a better grasp of emergent forms of bureaucratic imagery and imagination.

Download the symposium program, the booklet with presentation abstracts and speakers' bios, and find out more at filesformsfictions.com.

Talks, Conferences, Presentations (upcoming)

• February 26- March 1, 2026: "Seat Cushions, Hats, and Suits: Studies in Bureaucratic Objecthood" at the seminar Paper Pushers and Ink Suckers: Objectifying the Administrative Subject in Bureaucratic Fiction co-organized with Karolin Schäfer, ACLA Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada.

Talks, Conferences, Presentations (past)

• November 13-14, 2025: "Labyrinths, Machines, Monsters: Visual Ciphers of Bureaucracy" – Workshop: dia, Heidelberg, Germany;
• October 27, 2025: "Paper Trails and Vanishing Acts: Permanence and Ephemerality of Bureaucratic Forms" – Workshop: Ephemeral Epistemologies and Encounters, University of Tübingen, Germany;
• October 16-17: International Symposium Files, Forms, Fictions: The Literary Lives of Bureaucracy, from Ledgers to Algorithms, University of Bonn, Germany;
• October 9-10, 2025: "Lem, Luhmann, and Organizational Boundary Collapse: Grenzstellen in Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961)” – Workshop Grenzstellen: Literary and sociological modelling of the organization/environment boundary – WEAVE project group “Bureaugraphies”, University of Cologne, Germany;
• June 30, 2025: "Bureaucratic Fiction: Aesthetic Regimes of Administration in World Literature and Film" – Colloquium talk, University of Konstanz, Germany;
• June 4-6, 2025: "Bureaucratic Fiction, Bureaucratic Scripts: Institutional Writing in The Palace of Dreams and The Beautiful Bureaucrat" – Acts of Writing: Cultural Practices, Knowledge Construction, Authorship, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany;
• June 1, 2025: "Misplaced Personality: Foucault’s Lives of Infamous Men and Bureaucratic Modernism" – ACLA Panel: Varieties of the Impersonal (online);
• May 27, 2025: "Forms, Files, Fictions: Stories of Bureaucracy in Popular Culture" – Ringvorlesung Italien: POP-Popkultur-Popliteratur, University of Bonn, Germany;
• May 20-23, 2025: "Habsburg Protocols at the Edge of the Empire: Wartime Bureaucracy Records in Forest of the Hanged" – WEAVE project “Bürographien. Administration after the Age of Bureaucracy”, Vienna, Austria;
• April 23, 2025: "Bureaucratic Fiction: Aesthetic Regimes of Administration in World Literature and Film" – IGLK Colloquium, University of Bonn, Germany;
• April 3, 2025: "Archive Fever and Other Symptoms of Bureaucratic Malaise: Pathologies of Public Office in 20th and 21st Century Dystopian Novels” – Workshop: Dystopian Narratives and Stories about Illness, CAPONEU, Nicosia, Cyprus;
• November 20, 2024: “Bureaucratic Fiction: Narratives, Images, and Affects of Administration in Contemporary Literature and Film” – Humboldt Network Meeting, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany;
• October 3, 2024: “Vers une esthétique de la bureaucratie : le ‘grotesque administratif’ de Michel Foucault et ses avatars contemporains”. Rencontres doctorales – Centre Michel Foucault, IMEC-Abbaye d’Ardenne, Caen, France;
• June 6, 2024: “Bureaucracies of Memory. Institutionalized History in Four Contemporary European Novels”. Workshop: European Centres and Peripheries in the Political Novel, CAPONEU, ZfL Berlin, Germany.

Co-edited by Alexandra Irimia, Jonathan Foster and Burkhardt Wolf, a special issue of Administory: Journal for the History of Public Administration / Zeitschrift für Verwaltungsgeschichte themed "Administrative Cultures and Their Aesthetics" is now published.

Available in Open Access, the volume includes 17 contributions in English and German, along with an introductory study titled Looking Like an Administration: Towards an Aesthetic of Bureaucracy.