'We are creatures of the moment': corporate form and subjectivity in William Dean Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes

Thesis (M.A.) California State University, Los Angeles, 2012Committee members: Andrew L. Knighton, John Cleman, Maria Karafilis, Ruben QuinteroA Hazard of New Fortunes, Corporate Form, Corporations in Literature, Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Nineteenth-Century American Subjectivities, William Dean HowellsIn this project, I read <italic>A Hazard of New Fortunes</italic> as one of the first literary works to advance an understanding of the corporation as a paradigmatic form reorganizing all social relations. Rather than focusing solely on the instances in which the corporate form expresses itself as the corporation, <italic>Hazard</italic> traces the productive spaces that are opened up when the corporation exceeds its status as company and flows into the broader cultural and social terrain. Emulating the trans-mutability of the corporate form in literary form, the novel abstains from synthesizing the numerous subplots of its sprawling and all-encompassing narrative and instead centers on two loose manifestations of the corporate form, the corporation and the metropolis. In so doing, <italic>Hazard</italic> calls attention to the way in which these corporate assemblages produce a type of modern subjectivity to which I refer as the corporate subject