The Multiverse of Office Fiction liberates Herman Melville’s 1853 classic, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” from a microcosm of Melville studies, namely the so-called Bartleby Industry. This book aims to illuminate office fiction―fiction featuring office workers such as clerks, civil servants, and company employees―as an underexplored genre of fiction, by addressing relevant issues such as evolution of office work, integration of work and life, exploitation of women office workers, and representation of the Post Office. In achieving this goal, Bartleby plays an essential role not as one of the most eccentric characters in literary fiction, but rather as one of the most generic characters in office fiction. Overall, this book demonstrates that Bartleby is a generative figure, by incorporating a wide diversity of his cousins as Bartlebys. It offers fresh contexts in which to place these characters so that it can ultimately contribute to an ever-evolving poetics of the office.
Author(s): Masaomi Kobayashi
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 233
City: Cham
Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents
Part I: Reaching Out
Chapter 1: Introduction: Edward Hopper, or Bartleby on Bartlebys
The Official World
Beyond the Bartleby Industry
What If Bartlebys Were Women?
Into the Vast Ocean of Office Fiction
Chapter 2: Advice Columnist, Recall Specialist, Cyber Capitalist: Bartleby and His Kinsmen
Behind the Screen, Behind the Desk
The Citywide Office
The Christ Business: A Full-Time Job
150 Years after “Bartleby”
The Nationwide Office
Paper, Soap, Heaven
The Ubiquitous Office
Into the Web of Life
Into the Sphere of Death
Chapter 3: At Work, at Home, at Life: Bartleby and His Kinswomen
The Office; or, the Competent Woman
“Good in Business But Not in Love”
The Silence That Followed
The Impossibly
“Ah, Sure, Miranda”
And More Sisterhood
“What Do I Want Out of Life, Anyway?”
Part II: Farther Along
Chapter 4: Backward, Forward, Abroad: Bartleby and His Contexts
The Clerks as a Text Within the Text
Downward Career Move from the Officeholder
The General Post Office, London, or the Workplace like a Marketplace
The Detective-Clerk: “An Epistolary Voyeur”
The Dead Letter and Backward Extension
Gothicizing
Work-Life Breakdown
Kafka’s House Imagery and Samsa’s Dynamic Family
“What Is It That So Frightens All These Men?”
Toward a Narrative Poetics
Chapter 5: Post-9/11, Posthuman, Post Office: Between and Beyond Bartlebys
With 9/11, After 9/11
Rachael Rosen and Her Evolution
Away from Hu/Man-Centered Workplaces
Post-Work and the Meaning of Life
Life Goes on with Work
The United States Mails
Prose as Poetry
From Poet to Novelist
Chapter 6: Epilogue: Every Office Tells a Story, and So Does Every Bartleby
Can Bartleby Speak?
Bibliography
Index
