The mundane objects of office life—typewriters, filing cabinets, rubber stamps, corridors—function as more than mere background in literary representations of bureaucracy. From the “ronds-de-cuir” of Georges Courteline’s 1893 satirical bureaucrats to the “chupatintas” of Latin American administrative fiction to be found in Roberto Mariani’s Cuentos de la oficina (1925), writers across cultures have deployed office paraphernalia as both material reality and metaphorical framework for exploring the dehumanizing mechanisms of modern administrative systems. This panel investigates how authors worldwide use workplace objects to critique, reimagine, and resist bureaucratic power structures, transforming clerks into “pen/paper pushers” and reducing human agency to the mechanical repetition of administrative tasks.

We invite papers that examine office paraphernalia through multiple theoretical and cultural lenses:

Material Culture and Administrative Power: How do objects like staplers, typewriters, and filing systems become instruments of control and/or resistance? Papers might explore the evolution from mechanical to digital office technologies, examining how authors represent the changing relationship between human labor and administrative machinery.

Spatial Politics of the Office: The office as literary space—from the protective “womb” of bureaucratic routine to the devouring institutional body. We encourage analysis of inside/outside dynamics, hierarchical spatial arrangements, and the literary representation of corridors, cubicles, and executive suites as sites of class and gender negotiation.

Transnational Bureaucratic Aesthetics: Comparative approaches to office culture across literary traditions. How do different national literatures deploy similar objects (the typewriter, the file, the rubber stamp) to critique administrative systems? What cultural specificities emerge in representations of clerical labor?

The Clerk’s Body as Capital: Investigations of how administrative subjects are transformed into extensions of office machinery, examining the relationship between human embodiment and bureaucratic function through material objects (office wear, office technologies, desktop staples, ergonomic arrangements, storage facilities and retrieval devices, etc.)

Comparative and transnational approaches are especially but not exclusively encouraged.

Papers may draw upon:
Material culture studies and thing theory
Media archaeology and document studies
Labor studies and workplace literature criticism
Postcolonial approaches to administrative systems
Sound studies and the acoustic environment of bureaucracy
Gender studies and the feminization/masculinization of office work

Organizers
Karolin Schäfer (karolin.schaefer@uni-kassel.de, Universität Kassel (current research project: https://www.uni-kassel.de/forschung/kleine-souveraenitaet/startseite))
Alexandra Irimia (a.e.irimia@gmail.com, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn (current research project: https://www.iglk.uni-bonn.de/de/forschung/forschungsprojekte/bureaucratic-fiction))