Reading & Composition

What could be more boring than bureaucracies? The very word seems to connote malaise itself: long lines, endless forms, frustration, paperwork, and cubicles. And yet bureaucracies form the massive, silent foundation of the modern world: from multinational corporations to modern nation-states, to DMVs and universities, no institution can operate without a corresponding bureaucracy. Our lives are circumscribed by forms, figures, and numbers that hold an almost divine power over our fate: from credit scores to tax documents, to academic records, to social security numbers. It should come as no surprise that the stupidity and inefficiency of the bureaucracy has been the frequent target of literary satires and parodies. They’re also served as a password for political programs: Ronald Reagan campaigned on a promise to cut down and simplify the American bureaucracy (though his policies ended up having the opposite effect) and European populists target their ire at the ‘Eurocrats’ in Brussels: writing up pointless regulations and disconnected from ‘real people.’ 

This R1B course will think about bureaucracies historically, examining theories of public administration alongside literary and filmic representations of bureaucracies and the administrators who inhabit them. We will read a range of serious and satirical literary texts by writers like Balzac, Borges, Gogol, Kafka, Melville, and others, and we will view and read films like Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967), and Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985). We will discuss why bureaucracies make for such good political and satirical targets, and contemplate their universality: bureaucracies and their piles of paperwork can be found everywhere from Lagos to Leningrad, from Indonesia to Indiana. We will examine the specificities of ‘bureaucratic language:’ its euphemisms and circumlocutions, a workshop will let us practice translating texts into and out of bureaucratese. Rather than passing judgment on bureaucracies, this course will dwell on the deep ambivalence of bureaucracies in the cultural imaginary, asking: What we are to make of this social technology, which we love to hate, but would surely hate to live without?