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Preface
This book argues that the possibility that large collective organizations might
mean to do what they do—and might mean like us, like persons—animated an
astonishingly diverse set of American writers, artists, and theorists of the corpor-
ation in the first half of the twentieth century, stimulating a revolution of thought
on intention. Evidence appeared everywhere: not only in legal treatises and court
decisions, but in political illustrations, photographs, short stories, novels, and
poetry. The ambiguous status of corporate intention provoked conflicting theories
of meaning—on the relevance (or not) of authorial intention and the interpret-
ation of collective signs or social forms—still debated today. Most profoundly, the
prospect of meaningful corporate entities challenged thinkers to reimagine what it
means to act as a person or as a group.
If corporations could intend, then serious practical and philosophical questions
were understood to follow. How should those inside or outside the organization
interpret its actions? How did collective acts alter an individual’s creations?
Alternatively, if corporations could not intend—or at critical moments operated
without intending—then a different urgent set of questions followed. What could
we expect from the various human persons who act deliberately when they work
for them? How should we treat (or regulate) these entities and their productions?
As law struggled with opposing arguments (corporate intention, pro versus con),
creative writers and artists grappled with interrelated questions, albeit under
different guises and formal procedures. While versions of the debate continue,
often as disputes on corporate personhood or responsibility, this earlier deliber-
ation remains an almost wholly untapped resource of inventive legal and aesthetic
reasoning. By telling this story, I seek to open up that reserve to anyone who might
want to use it.
As should be clear, my aim is deliberately multidisciplinary. Fittingly, this book
began during a sabbatical at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences eight
years ago thanks to two events: Morton Horwitz allowed me to audit his Legal
History of Economic Regulation course, and Justice Stephen Breyer chatted with
me about my research. The first experience opened up an entirely new realm
beyond literary criticism to think about the question of how corporations mean
what they seem to say; the second convinced me that literature had something
meaningful to say to law. Making my case required learning about how lawyers
know, inspiring a journey—earning a J.D.—concurrent with (and thankfully
finalized during) the writing of this book. Law school involved many more
discussions with legal scholars, both in the classroom and out, and I am deeply
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vi
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the opportunities and generous support provided by the Visiting
Scholars Program at the American Academy of Arts and Science, an American
Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions
Fellowship (which funded a year of study at Harvard University), and the munifi-
cent tuition-benefit program at Southern Methodist University, all of which made
a book like this possible.
Audiences at multiple conferences and at the American Academy, Concordia
University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Newberry Library,
Southern Methodist University, Stockholm University, University of Texas at
Dallas, Uppsala University, Wesleyan University, West Florida University, Yale
University, and elsewhere have contributed to my thinking in innumerable ways.
I especially want to thank Charles Altieri, Robin Blyn, Benjamin Coates, Todd
Cronan, Michael D’Arcy, Mary Maples Dunn, Bo G. Ekelund, Benjamin Fagan,
Danuta Fjellestad, Laura Frost, Daniel Geary, Gül Bilge Han, Andy Hoberek, Elsa
Högberg, Amy Hungerford, Chin Jou, Katherine Lee, Michael LeMahieu, Matt
Levay, Hans Lind, Douglas Mao, Melissa Milewski, Justus Nieland, Mathias
Nilges, Liesl Olson, Charles Palermo, Paige Reynolds, John-Paul Riquelme, Matt
Rubery, Lisi Schoenberg, Emily Setina, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Eric Sundquist, and
Michael Szalay for invitations to engage in thoughtful conversations with them.
At Harvard, I was extremely fortunate to work through many of these ideas
with Christine Desan, Charles Donahue, John C.P. Goldberg, Annette Gordon-
Reed, Morton Horwitz, Michael Sandel, Tim Scanlon, Cass Sunstein, Richard
Tuck, Adrian Vermeule, and Lucie White. I appreciate their enthusiasm in
welcoming a faculty member who invaded their classrooms.
My friends and colleagues at SMU and in Dallas offered every kind of encour-
agement, while making work a pleasure: thanks to Caroline Brettell, Greg
Brownderville, Dennis Foster, Amy Freund, Anne Frey, Joanna Grossman,
Grant Hayden, Bruce Levy, Alexis McCrossen, Alicia Meuret, Dan Moss, Jasper
Neel, Beth Newman, Willard Spiegelman, Beth Thornburg, and Steve
Weisenburger. Tête-à-têtes with Tim Rosendale, Jayson Sae-Saue, and Rajani
Sudan made Dallas Hall my home away from home. I am grateful to Steve
Currall, Darryl Dickson-Carr, Tom DiPiero, Paul Ludden, Peter Moore, Nina
Schwartz, and Bill Tsuisui for their generous financial support of my writing.
Graduate students shared their creative insights on corporate personhood that
helped me refine various chapters; I especially want to thank Matt Clemmer, Nate
McCabe, Seth McKelvey, Kevin Pickard, and Ashley Winstead. Kate Boswell’s
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 7/9/2020, SPi
viii
keen eyes were a tremendous help with research and finishing touches. The tennis
guys (broadly interpreted, including Sophie Burton, Erica Charters, Guy Chet,
Chris Morris, Todd Smith, and Jill Montgomery) are already sorely missed.
Landing amongst a lovely new group of colleagues and graduate students, at the
Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins, has been
delightful. Thanks to Evelyne Ender, Leonardo Lisi, Paola Marrati, Anne Eakin
Moss, Yi-Ping Ong, and Satoru Hashimoto for warmly welcoming me, and to the
irreplaceable Marva Philip for keeping me smiling. The Johns Hopkins Law and
Humanities reading group offered a clutch appraisal of the Introduction at the
moment I needed it most: thanks to Sharon Achinstein, Jennifer Culbert, Nur
Kirmizidag, and Tvrtko Vrodoljak for their fruitful suggestions.
For thoughtfully reading sections—sometimes at an early stage—and conse-
quently improving the finished product enormously, I am hugely grateful to
Jennifer Ashton, Nicholas Brown, Nicolette Bruner, J. D. Connor, Theo Davis,
Mary Esteve, Michael Fried, Melissa Ganz, Dan Gil, Jason Gladstone, Sean
McCann, Walter Benn Michaels, Deak Nabers, John Plotz, Julie Reiser, Emilio
Sauri, Michael Schreyach, Daniel Stout, Kenneth Warren, and Rachel Watson.
Their insights are beyond appreciated. I hope to repay the favor.
Gracious assistance with images, archives, and permissions was provided by Bill
Rukeyser, Catherine V. Moore, Paul Espinosa, Margie Goldsmith, and Michaël
Borremans. At Oxford, Aimee Wright and the two anonymous reviewers pro-
vided helpful comments and suggestions. Law and Literature series editors Robert
Spoo and Simon Stern have done a tremendous job in supporting and nurturing
this project—I can’t thank them enough. Every comment they made resulted in a
much better book.
Charles Hatfield and Shari Goldberg have lived with countless permutations of
this book and have read endless versions along the way. Any elegant phrases in
what follows are thanks to Shari; any crisp formulations are Charles’s doing. I am
so grateful for their friendship, texts, and conversations.
Love and gratitude go to Reuben, Patricia, and Jen Siraganian, and Scott, Virgil,
and Homer Paterson, for endless encouragement and support, always. Isabel and
Brian Hewitt have dwelt with this book in a different way—both because law
school took me away from home many evenings and because writing took me to
my laptop many days. They didn’t ask for that but accepted it with boundless
grace, good humor, and love; I could not have finished it without them. Isabel
amazes me daily with her maturity, creativity, wit, and true kindness. And no
corporate charter could or ever will approximate the form of my partnership with
Brian, for which I’m grateful with all my heart.
Excerpt & Image from “The Dam” in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser
Copyright © 2005 by Muriel Rukeyser Reprinted by permission of ICM Partners.
Excerpts from “Corporate Entity” from Collected Poems 1917–1982 by Archibald
MacLeish Copyright © 1985 by The Estate of Archibald MacLeish Reprinted by
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ix
List of Illustrations
1.6. Thomas Nast, “The Rising of the Usurpers, And the sinking of the
liberties of the People,” (1889). Print Collection, Miriam and
Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York
Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 79
3.1. Gertrude Stein, G. M. P. Manuscript Notebook. YCAL 22: 432. Gertrude
Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 130
3.2. Will Crawford, Watching the tape or watching the wheel—what is the
difference morally? Puck 72, no. 1852 (August 28, 1912). The caption
reads: “If it is legal to gamble in Wall Street, why isn’t it legal to gamble
in the West Forties?” Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Washington, D.C. 133
4.1. Lewis W. Hine, [Doffer Boys, Macon, Georgia], Jan. 1909. J. Paul
Getty Museum. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content
Program. 142
4.2. Textile Workers Strike, Lawrence, MA (1912). Walter P. Reuther
Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. 147
4.3. Udo J. Keppler, “Get after the substance, not the shadow,” Puck 68, no. 1757
(November 2, 1910). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Washington, D.C. 151
4.4. Udo J. Keppler, “Get after the substance, not the shadow,” detail,
Puck 68, no. 1757 (November 2, 1910). Library of Congress Prints
and Photographs Division. Washington, D.C. 152
5.1. “Consolidated Edison—City of Light Diorama—Artist painting
model.” New York World’s Fair 1939–1940 records, Manuscripts
and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. 210
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 7/9/2020, SPi
List of Abbreviations
BNM George S. Schuyler, Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and
Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933–1940 (Boston,
MA: Northeastern University Press, 1989; 1931).
CG Morris Raphael Cohen, “Communal Ghosts and Other Perils in Social
Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 16, no. 25
(December 4, 1919): 673–90. Republished in Reason and Nature (1931).
CR Jena Osman, Corporate Relations (Providence, RI: Burning Deck/Anyart, 2014).
CU Citizens United v. Fed. Election Comm’n, 558 U.S. 310, 394 (2010).
D Maurice Wormser, Disregard of the Corporate Fiction and Allied Corporation
Problems (New York: Baker, Voorhis, and Company, 1927).
G Richard Powers, Gain (New York: Picador, 1998).
GS2 Gertrude Stein, Writings 1932–1946, Volume 2, ed. Catherine R. Stimpson and
Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998).
F Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (New York: Penguin, 1995).
FrI Maurice Wormser, Frankenstein, Incorporated (New York and London:
Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1931).
HL Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 573 US 682 (2014).
I G. E. M. [Elizabeth] Anscombe, Intention, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000).
IM Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952).
IPN George Saunders, “In Persuasion Nation,” Harper’s Magazine (November 2005),
81–8.
LLT F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New
York: Scribner, 1993).
LNC Ernst Freund, The Legal Nature of Corporations (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1897).
M Paul Grice, “Meaning” (1948, 1957) in Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1989), 213–23.
MP Frederic Maitland, “Moral Personality and Legal Personality” in State, Trust and
Corporation, ed. David Runciman and Magnus Ryan (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 62–74.
MPGS Gertrude Stein, Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein: With Two Shorter Stories
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000).
O Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (New York: Penguin, 1994).
PCS W. Jethro Brown, “The Personality of the Corporation and the State,” Law
Quarterly Review 21 (October 1905): 365–79.
PHS F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Pat Hobby Stories (New York: Scribner, 1995).
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 7/9/2020, SPi
PL Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “The Path of the Law,” Harvard Law Review 10
(March 25, 1897).
T Charles Reznikoff, Testimony: The United States (1885–1915): Recitative
(Boston, MA: Black Sparrow/David Godine, 2014).
YCAL Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Yale University.
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Introduction
Acting Corporate
Long before the U.S. Supreme Court announced that corporate persons freely
“speak” with money in the contentious decision Citizens United v. Federal Election
Commission (2010), the same Court elaborated the legal fiction of American
corporate personhood in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886).¹ That
much earlier case permitted business collectivities to function as legal actors in a
system historically restricted to certain human beings (generally, adult white male
property holders). Santa Clara also blessed the American corporate person with
basic civil rights, including, most dramatically, equal protection under the
Fourteenth Amendment.² Yet this development of what was known as “corporate
personality”—that is, of endowing a nonhuman entity with certain rights—
exposed a fundamental philosophical question about the possibility of collective
intention, one extending beyond the law.³ Indeed, that problem had become
essential to modern American literature. When legal treatise writer Arthur
¹ Citizens United v. Fed. Election Comm’n, 558 U.S. 310, 394 (2010) and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby
Stores, Inc. 573 US 682 (2014), hereafter cited within the text as CU and HL, respectively. Santa Clara
County v. S. Pac. R. Co., 118 U.S. 394 (1886).
² In addition to equal protection, the corporation’s civil rights included the right to own property,
contract, sue and be sued, and demand due process; all are variously discussed in the chapters to follow.
A debate remains regarding the importance of Santa Clara and the Fourteenth Amendment to the
doctrine of American corporate personhood and corporate civil rights; see Chapter 5. I focus almost
entirely on American corporate personhood debates, but a rich history and scholarship exists of corporate
legal personhood discussions in civil law jurisdictions such as Europe; a comparative analysis is a field of
its own. See, generally, Journal of Comparative Corporate Law and Securities Regulation (2013–); Sofie
Cools, “The Real Difference in Corporate Law between the United States and Continental Europe:
Distribution of Powers,” Delaware Journal of Corporate Law 30, no. 3 (September 2005): 697–766;
Reinier H. Kraakman, John Armour, Paul Davies, Luca Enriques, et al., The Anatomy of Corporate
Law: A Comparative and Functional Approach, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
³ A note on terminology: “Legal personality” was an oft-used phrase at common law by the 1860s, a
term of art for the legal existence or status of someone or something regarded as a person by law. The
early twentieth-century meaning of “corporate personality” takes our contemporary conception of an
individual “personality” (with distinctive characteristics and identity) and combines it with the formal,
juridical qualities of a legal fiction, what we now describe as “legal personhood.” Consequently, the
phrase “corporate personality” was less moralistic or religiously inflected than “corporate soul” and less
political than “corporate personhood,” a term not in American circulation until 1978. Lane v. Lane, 375
So. 2d 660, 681 (La. Ct. App. 1978) writ denied, 381 So. 2d 1222 (La. 1980). Many of these terms are
analyzed more substantively throughout the book.
Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons. Lisa Siraganian, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Lisa Siraganian.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198868873.001.0001
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/9/2020, SPi
Machen wondered (in 1911) if the “corporate organism [can] possess a will,” or if
the corporate “person has a mind” or “a body capable of being imprisoned,” his
flummoxed response was not unique; poet Gertrude Stein had already struggled to
produce “a completed description” of group personalities in A Long Gay Book
(1909), tackling versions of Machen’s same quandaries.⁴ Both wondered some-
thing like the following: if they could not be sure how to represent a “corporate
organism,” or who intended what a collectivity “said,” or—most basically—why it
acted, then how could they know what it meant? Machen and Stein’s dilemma was
more or less straightforward. Possible solutions were not.
This book explores answers to these questions and the conundrums following
logically from them: how formally to conceptualize human-like entities whose
behaviors defy basic assumptions about human action and thus, necessarily,
intention. Combining legal analysis of law reviews, treatises, and case law with
literary interpretation of short stories, novels, and poems, the chapters that follow
investigate corporate personhood (or personality) during the early twentieth
century as a site of basic deliberations about how collective social agents could
possibly mean the actions, of speech or otherwise, attributed to them. Rather than
a rigid jurisprudential position, corporate personhood functioned as a philosoph-
ical debate, occurring simultaneously yet dissimilarly in American literature and
in law, stimulating some of the most ambitious thinking on intention in the
twentieth century. Conversations about these agents generated radically different
approaches to the problem of collective intention—that is, about how meaning
could be produced by entities like corporations. Whereas legal thought needed to
resolve this issue quickly and practically, and did so by narrowly focusing on a
corporation’s signifiers as such, much modern literature insisted, instead, that
looking for a corporation’s presumable intention—for an answer to why it did
what it did—could not be avoided.
To be clear, I am using “intention” in the robust, reflective sense associated with
the postwar philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe, H. L. A. Hart, and Stanley Cavell,
among others, and several decades later in the literary theory of Walter Benn
Michaels and Steven Knapp, where intention is forcefully equated with meaning.⁵
⁴ Arthur Machen, “Corporate Personality,” Harvard Law Review 24, nos. 4–5 (February-March
1911): 257–8; 348–9. Gertrude Stein, Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein: With Two Shorter Stories
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000), 17. Hereafter cited within the text as MPGS.
⁵ “Intention” is a ubiquitous and variable term in a great number of disciplines, including many
tackled here. Without ignoring crucial distinctions between these thinkers, important touchstones for
my usage of the term include G. E. M. [Elizabeth] Anscombe, Intention, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 9 (referenced parenthetically as I within the text); Stuart Hampshire
and H. L. A. Hart, “Decision, Intention and Certainty,” Mind 67, No. 265 (January 1958): 1–12; Stuart
Hampshire, Thought and Action (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959); H. L. A. Hart, “Acts of Will and
Responsibility” (1960) and “Intention and Punishment” (1967), repr. in Punishment and Responsibility:
Essays in the Philosophy of Law, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Stanley Cavell,
Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays, updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002); Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4
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3
For these thinkers, “intention” is not equivalent to “the author’s state of mind,”
which remains the conventional legal position.⁶ It is, instead, closer to what Robert
Pippin describes as modern art’s “embodied ‘mindedness,’ ” in which “intention is
only ‘realized’ . . . in the deed or in the work.”⁷ Or as Cavell observes about modern
music, we are fundamentally seeking to “discover the artist’s intention in a work”
when we want to know a work’s meaning and ask, “Why is it as it is?”⁸ But the
story this book tells occurred well before any of these philosophers or theorists
were making claims about how we intend in language, law, or art. Modern
American literature, I argue, generated an early workshop of thought experiments
on how seemingly authorless entities make meaning; later philosophy of action
and deconstructive theory grappled with reciprocal ideas on their own terms.
Relieved of the conditions of expediency, efficiency, and conclusiveness that law
necessarily imposes on itself, the writing of poets and novelists like Stein, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Muriel Rukeyser, George Schuyler, and Charles Reznikoff (among
others) contemplated the collective intention hypothesis through literature’s
own formal conditions and inventions.
For these reasons, my aim here is neither to deploy literature to describe what a
corporate entity is or to prescribe what it should be in law, nor to resolve the
normative question of whether or not corporations should be considered persons
at all. This is not primarily a book about how laws affect (or are represented in)
literature and art, or how both writers and jurists reproduce ideology—although
I do say something about those issues in the chapters to follow. Rather, this book
brings to light the theoretical debate taking place in literature and in law about
whether or not collective social agents intend—and, if so, how they might manifest
meaning. All of which is to say that this book is less interested in advancing a legal
opinion about a decision like Hobby Lobby (the 2014 Supreme Court decision
protecting corporate religious beliefs) than it is in exploring how the vexed, yet
unavoidable philosophical problem at the heart of that decision—and many
others—was addressed in compelling ways by literature. Solving those problems
mattered to jurists like Machen, who needed to be able to talk about the corpor-
ation’s “will,” to modern writers like Stein, needing to conceptualize person-like
(Summer 1982): 723–42; “A Reply to Our Critics,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 4 (June 1983): 790–800; and
the various responses that were part of this critical debate, collected in Against Theory: Literary Studies
and the New Pragmaticism, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). See also
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Not a Matter of Interpretation,” San Diego Law Review
42 (2005): 651–68.
⁶ Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 155.
This narrower sense of “intention,” codified in criminal law, is ubiquitous in legal literature. The
problems with accounts of intention focusing on causal internal states is addressed both in the next
section of the Introduction and in the following several chapters.
⁷ Robert Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2014), 141, 20.
⁸ Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” in Mean, 225.
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/9/2020, SPi
things such as art objects and collectivities, and to all of us, whether lawmakers,
scholars, or simply interpreters of the corporate speech we encounter daily.
These multidisciplinary claims assume that law is more than the substance of its
technical rules and procedures, on which most creative writers had little expertise.
The law is also a social system that endures “in the atmosphere, invisible and
unfelt” directly, as Lawrence Friedman and Grant Hayden write.⁹ Moreover, both
legal and corporate personhood are socially fashioned, a point announced by John
Dewey in 1926: “ ‘person’ signifies what law makes it signify.”¹⁰ Contingent at any
given moment in time, such constructs emerge from centuries-long conversations
about who and what we should give voice to, why we do this, and what benefits or
repercussions might follow.¹¹
Unexpectedly, the problem of corporate personhood became an essential for-
mal problem for modern American literature in particular, an assertion that will
require more elaboration both in this chapter and throughout the book.
Committed to creating art objects that challenged us to ask why they are as they
are—think of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal “sculpture” Fountain, H.D.’s spare
imagist poems, or Langston Hughes’s jazz-collage verses—some of the boldest
and most talented creative writers intuited that a comparable provocation was
being put to the corporate entity and its manifestations in the world. Knowing art
objects, of whatever type, required versions of questions one posed to corporate
entities to know why they acted. In either case, figuring out modern art’s or the
corporation’s intention was no easy task. These objects/entities incorporated both
profoundly directed purposes, along with parts (or actions) apparently devoid of
meaning. Understanding the art object’s or the corporation’s composite form—
asking, as does Cavell, “Why is it the way it is?”—seemed to be the only way to
know whether any intention existed there at all.
Crucially, as modernist writers were doing this work, critics failed to recognize
the serious project developing right in front of them, a blind spot that generated
repercussions to literary criticism and jurisprudence for decades. To see modern-
ism’s thinking, consider Rukeyser’s brilliant and still underappreciated poetry of
U.S. 1 (1938) as a case in point, capturing in miniature the issues and themes I am
articulating. In the middle of one of her avant-garde texts about the devastating
construction of a hydroelectric dam, Rukeyser quotes a congressman reiterating a
then familiar truism: “Mr. Griswold. ‘A corporation is a body without a soul’ ”
⁹ Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden, American Law: An Introduction, 3rd edition
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 2. On law as substantive and procedural rules, see
H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).
¹⁰ John Dewey, “The Historic Background of Corporate Legal Personality,” Yale Law Journal
35 (April 1926): 655. Personhood’s status as merely conventional was already current in Ancient
Roman law; Yasco Horsman and Frans-Willem Korsten, “Introduction: Legal Bodies: Corpus/ Persona/
Communitas,” Law & Literature 28, no. 3 (2016): 277–85.
¹¹ An extensive literature on related philosophical questions of personhood began after Roe v. Wade
(1972), discussed in the next section.
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5
(“The Dam,” 101). The corporation invoked is the Union Carbide and Carbon
Corporation (through its subsidiary the New Kanawha Power Corporation and its
contractor, the Rinehart & Dennis Company) responsible for the deaths of
between 700 and several thousand miners in the early 1930s after they dug a
three-mile tunnel through a silica-rich mountain in Gauley Bridge, West
Virginia.¹² The mostly black migrant laborers in the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel quickly
experienced fatal lung damage (silicosis), easily preventable had the companies
spent money on basic safety precautions. In a poetic sequence depicting what is
still the worst industrial disaster in American history, Rukeyser puts us on notice
that corporate form, and its legal, social, and moral status, will be challenged.¹³
Having read exposés about the calamity in the New Masses, and following the
congressional hearings in the news, Rukeyser and her friend, the photographer
and experimental filmmaker Nancy Naumburg, drove to Gauley Bridge in the
spring of 1936 to conduct investigations of their own.¹⁴ While Rukeyser inter-
viewed surviving witnesses, Naumburg shot photographs, now mostly lost,
although a few turned up decades later. As the surviving pictures make clear,
they planned a photo-documentary project, similar in ambition to James Agee and
Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), on a tragedy that had
spurred a national conversation on industrial operations, corporate power, and
social responsibility. [Figs. 0.1 and 0.2] Although Gauley Bridge was positioned
“inland,” removed from obvious hubs of economic influence, writes Rukeyser, the
disaster was “created by theories, systems, and workmen” funded by the mid-
Atlantic financial center.¹⁵
The women’s co-creation never materialized, but each continued to ponder
how collective social agency might manifest in the world, and why interpreting
corporate actions could be burdened with complexity. Naumburg moved to
California and edited a collection of essays theorizing Hollywood studio film as
“the most co-operative of all art forms; the work of all the minds which enter into
its production must be fused into a unified whole.”¹⁶ Anticipating later film
authorship theories, Naumburg asserts that a film’s “artistic importance” can
only be achieved if this fusing happens “in the interpretation of a single
¹² Catherine Venable Moore, “Introduction,” The Book of the Dead (Morgantown, WV: West
Virginia University Press, 2018), 4–7; Martin Cherniak, The Hawk’s Nest Incident: American’s Worst
Industrial Disaster (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).
¹³ The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, eds. Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog, with Jan
Heller Levi (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).
¹⁴ On Rukeyser and Naumburg’s travels in relation to “The Book of the Dead,” see Michael
Thurston, “Documentary Modernism as Popular Front Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Book of the
Dead,’ ” Modern Language Quarterly 60, no. 1 (January 1, 1999): 59–83; and Michael Davidson,
Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1997), 135–70.
¹⁵ Rukeyser, Collected Poems, 604.
¹⁶ Nancy Naumburg, “Foreword,” in We Make the Movies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937), xx.
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 10/9/2020, SPi
Fig. 0.1. Nancy Naumburg, George Robinson’s Kitchen in Vanetta. 1970s [1936].
Gelatin silver print, 10.4 16.9 cm (4⅛ 6 ⅝ in.). Walker Evans Archive, 1994
(1994.263.33). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image copyright © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. © Margie Goldsmith.
Fig. 0.2. Walker Evans, Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead (1936). Gelatin silver print,
16.5 18.3 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
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Language: Hungarian
KÜLFÖLDI
REGÉNYÍRÓK
WALDEMAR BONSELS
EMBEREK ÚTJA
EGY CSAVARGÓ JEGYZETEIBŐL
FORDÍTOTTA SAJÓ ALADÁR
Szemes.