April 28, 4:15pm: A Panel Discussion of Lisa Siraganian’s ‘Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons’

April 28, 4:15pm: A Panel Discussion of Lisa Siraganian’s ‘Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons’

Please join us next week for a panel discussion to celebrate the launch of Lisa Siraganian’s new book, Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons. Professor Siraganian will be joined by panelists Andrew Miller (English, JHU), Melissa Ganz (English, Marquette), Roy Kreitner (Law, Tel Aviv), Nate McCabe (CTL, JHU). A poster for the event is attached to this email.

The talk will be held via Zoom, from 4:15-6:00pm (EDT) on Wednesday, April 21st. To access the talk, please email [email protected] and more information will be forwarded to you.

Lisa Siraganian is Associate Professor, J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities, and Department Chair in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. Her research bridges aesthetic and legal theory, with particular attention to modernist art and literature and its long reception. Her first book, Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life (Oxford 2012), examined the political legacy and resonance of modernist artists’ claims for the autonomy of the art object. The book provides readings of a range of figures—including Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, William Gaddis, Charles Olson, Amiri Baraka, and Juliana Spahr—in order to analyze how evolving ideas of art’s ontological status have been put in service of varied political projects, from suffragism to Black Nationalism. In doing so, Siraganian puts particular emphasis on the bodily rhetorics which surround discussions of the art object, especially in considerations of breath and breathing. Writing relating to and extending from this project has appeared in diverse publications, including Law and Literature, American Literary History, Modernism/Modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, nonsite, and Post45. Her recent book, Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons (Oxford 2020), extends the concern with political and aesthetic autonomy into the legal sphere, providing a multidisciplinary account of the rise of ‘corporate personhood’ or ‘corporate personality’:

Long before the US Supreme Court announced that corporate persons freely “speak” with money in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), they elaborated the legal fiction of American corporate personhood in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Yet endowing a non-human entity with certain rights exposed a fundamental philosophical question about the possibility of collective intention. That question extended beyond the law and became essential to modern American literature. This volume offers the first multidisciplinary intellectual history of this story of corporate personhood.

The possibility that large collective organizations might mean to act like us, like persons, animated a diverse set of American writers, artists, and theorists of the corporation in the first half of the twentieth century, stimulating a revolution of thought on intention. The ambiguous status of corporate intention provoked conflicting theories of meaning–on the relevance (or not) of authorial intention and the interpretation of collective signs or social forms–still debated today. As law struggled with opposing arguments, modernist creative writers and artists grappled with interrelated questions, albeit under different guises and formal procedures. Combining legal analysis of law reviews, treatises, and case law with literary interpretation of short stories, novels, and poems, this volume analyzes legal philosophers including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Frederic Maitland, Harold Laski, Maurice Wormser, and creative writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Charles Reznikoff, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Schuyler.

(https://global.oup.com/academic/product/modernism-and-the-meaning-of-corporate-persons-9780198868873?cc=us&lang=en&#)

  • Andrew Miller is Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He works on 19th century British literature, and the connection between literary aesthetics and moral philosophy. He was the long-time editor of Victorian Studies, and is author of The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth Century Literature (Cornell 2008) and Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge 1995). His most recent book is On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives (Harvard 2020), an analysis of the trope of considering alternative in a diverse body of novels, poems, and films.
  • Melissa Ganz is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Marquette University. Her research focuses on 18th and 19th-century British literature, with attention to the entanglement of law, ethics, and literature. Her book, Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment (Virginia 2019), attends to the underappreciated centrality of nuptial law to the development of the marriage plot, examining the attendant interrelations of public law and private lives in the work of novelists like Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Eliza Fenwick, and Amelia Opie.
  • Roy Kreitner is Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University. He teaches contracts, jurisprudence, and commercial law, and his research focuses on private law theory, the legal history of contracts, and the theory of money. His book, Calculating Promises: The Emergence of Modern American Contract Doctrine (Stanford 2007), provides a history of American contract law centered on the transition to the 20th century, when legal scholars envisioned “calculating promisors” as integral to the notion of contract.
  • Nate McCabe is a PhD Student in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. He works on Modernism and the avant-garde in early 20th-century American poetry, photography, and film. He combines this with scholarship in media theory, ordinary language philosophy, and theories of intention and autonomy.