In “The Conglomerate Form,” Zachary Tavlin counteracts the disproportionate emphasis on genre and authorship in studies of corporate fiction by attuning our attention to narrative. Tavlin argues that conglomeration constitutes a narrative form and, precisely, a firm form. Firm forms are storytelling conventions and narrative effects that absorb and perform the corporation’s interpersonal and spatial hierarchies—the specific corporate relationships that distinguish partners or executives from each other and from everyone else—through written and visual means. Employing an intermedial lens that makes critical connections between the contemporary novel (Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End [2007]) and serial television (HBO’s Succession [2018–2023]), Tavlin claims that three primary devices make up conglomerate media’s firm-form narrativity: “interesting” or “exceptional” shots and descriptions that mark characters’ alienation from the “direct arteries” of corporate control; “sequences that break the attentional axis of action or dialogue,” creating spatial and characterological interchangeabilities; and dialogue as a currency or stabilizing force, a resource which characters can and will inevitably “fudge.”

In “Desperation Aesthetics: The Contemporary Copywriter Novel,” Blake Beaver borrows from Sianne Ngai’s theory of “zany” and “gimmicky” aesthetic categories to describe a circuit of extreme attempts at artistic production in recent “copywriter novels.” Beaver defines these as literary, genre, and popular novels by current or former copywriters that make advertising their representational content (the agency setting, the production of ads as narrative events) and form (the written and audiovisual conventions of ads). Focusing on two such contemporary novels in the U.S. and U.K.—Matt Beaumont’s e (2000) and John Kenney’s Truth in Advertising (2013)—Beaver suggests that, in their bid for cultural legitimacy, these novels betray a desperate aesthetic performativity we can identify in their recursive return to cinematographic, scenic, and epistolary clichés. The economically precarious copywriter’s exhaustive and exhausted tropology indexes how the overworked novelist, narrator, and character’s aesthetic production cannot find the time or energy to escape the banalities of the TV commercial, slogan, sitcom episode, and other marketing/marketized forms.

In “With Gods on Our Side: Hindu Corporate Writing,” Hans-Georg Erney uniquely strengthens the approaches of this panel by introducing a South Asian comparative dimension. Erney’s paper centers on the interpenetrations of Indian Business and Hindu-nationalist ideologies in contemporary cultural production through a formal constellation he names “Hindu Corporate Writing.” Erney elaborates on this discursive vein by elucidating the resonances between Deepak Kaul’s novel Corpokshetra (2016), a contemporary comedic take on the ancient Mahabharata epic, and Hindu management and ethics books, like Devdutt Pattanaik’s Business Sutra (2013) and Gurcharan Das’s The Difficulty of Being Good (2009). Erney suggests that, in addition to the ideological complexity of applying an “ancient sacred text to the modern world of business,” these works traffic in a distinctive confusion of the “elements of metaphor,” alternating between the competing forms of corporation (a legal/economic construct) and epic (a narrative, poetic form of extraordinary scale) depending on their situational utility.

Together, these presentations assert the ongoing salience of literary and intermedial studies for the political critique of companies and conglomerates and the continuing significance of literary and visual forms as resources for contemporary ideological projects, corporate and otherwise. By forging connections between the U.S., U.K., and Indian contexts and between literature, television, and advertising, our panel embodies the connective and relational thinking constitutive of this year’s theme, “family resemblances.”