Corporate service sectors have displaced literature as the site of radical narrative innovation

Evidence

As for the world of anthropology, so for the world of literature. It is not just that people with degrees in English generally go to work for corporations (which of course they do); the point is that the company, in its most cutting-edge incarnation, has become the arena in which narratives and fictions, metaphors and metonymies and symbol networks at their most dynamic and incisive are being generated, worked through and transformed. While “official” fiction has retreated into comforting nostalgia about kings and queens, or supposed tales of the contemporary rendered in an equally nostalgic mode of unexamined realism, it is funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde. It is they who, now, seem to be performing writers’ essential task of working through the fragmentations of old orders of experience and representation, and coming up with radical new forms to chart and manage new, emergent ones. If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 153

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to her core thesis from earlier chapters that immediacy is an economic symptom; also evokes the frame of literary studies’ corporatization debates.
• SEED: Possible essay angle: testing whether ‘brand consultancies as avant-garde’ holds, or whether it is a provocation designed to antagonize literary traditionalism.