Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons

by Lisa Siraganian

Overview

Winner, Matei Calinescu Prize, Modern Language Association

Winner, 2021 Modernist Studies Award, Modernist Studies Association

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192884671
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2023
Series:	Law and Literature
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Lisa Siraganian, J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities, Johns Hopkins University

Lisa Siraganian is J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities, Associate Professor, and Chair of the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Modernism's Other Work: The Art Object's Political Life, shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize (2013). Her work has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Acting Corporate1. Contracting Without Meaning2. Incoherent Corporate Speech3. Emergent Corporate Mind4. Limited Poetic Liability5. Invisible Corporate ManCoda as Brief: Contemporary Literature v. Hobby Lobby

Editorial Reviews

"The lessons that Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons afford are both timely and timeless. The fundamental questions that Siraganian's study poses are perennial ones of legal and philosophical thought regarding corporate personhood ... Siraganian's history both finds possible avenues for wrestling with these questions that we have largely forgotten or ignored, and, in the process, tells a clear story of corporate personhood in the US. In this way, this study is likely to be a touchstone for those interested in law and literature, as well as studies of corporate personhood more broadly." — Kevin Musgrave, American Literary History

"Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons is a genealogy of a legal concept read through the lens of the aesthetic revolution that occurred simultaneously. It admirably weaves together sustained analyses of case law, legal philosophy, and literature. Scholars interested in legal history, intellectual history, or jurisprudence, will find much to interest them here." — Jack Quirk, Law, Culture and the Humanities

"A complex and comprehensive examination of how corporate bodies, though separate from individual persons, might indeed have similar intentionality along with collective inattention ... This is an innovative and insightful study, both timely and universal." — T. Bonner Jr., CHOICE

"An erudite and impressive book. The final chapter on race and corporate personhood is particularly satisfying ... Siraganian unveils a legal fiction more bizarre and convoluted than could be dreamed up by the most ingenious modernist. Reckoning with this dimension of corporate personhood may prove helpful for challenging America's racial formations and for imagining antiracist alternatives." — Clare Eby, Twentieth-Century Literature

"They do everything people do—except breathe, die and go to jail for dumping 1.3 million pounds of PCBs in the Hudson River." You may recognize this characterization of corporations from the satire of Stephen Colbert, but it is Lisa Siraganian who unearths the legal and literary foundations of corporate personality in her extraordinary Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons. .... The brilliance of Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons lies in its dedicated multidisciplinarity. Siraganian honors the means and ends of the law, literature, and philosophy and uses their disparate ways of thinking, feeling, and reasoning to illuminate the soulless corporation in all its unnatural personhood" — The Modernist Studies Association

"Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons is that rare work that draws upon a genuine mastery of two distinct disciplines, and in so doing generates striking new insights in both. Moving adroitly between US jurisprudence and case history on the one hand and modernist literature on the other, it shows how the legal invention of corporate personhood reverberated well beyond the nation's courts and boardrooms. Indeed, this bold and often-dazzling study reveals the persistence and rigor with which the likes of Gertrude Stein, Muriel Rukeyser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Schuyler, and Ralph Ellison used the evolving doctrine of corporate personhood to think through issues as seemingly diverse as authorial intention and the nature of social and political collectives." — Michael Szalay, author of New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State

"Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons offers a compelling argument by opening up, far beyond traditional doctrinal concerns, novel vistas on corporate personhood that will greatly interest both those working in the field of Law and the Humanities and legal professionals. Crisply written, this is a thought-provoking monograph that forces us to reflect on acute philosophical and ethical questions about what it means to be "a person" in every sense of the word." — Jeanne Gaakeer, author of Judging from Experience

From the Publisher