Corporate ethics in the 21st-century American novels (D. Eggers’ “The Circle”, G. Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story”)
Abstract
The article presents an analysis of corporate ethics in the 21st-century American literature within the context of surveillance capitalism and the erosion of liberal values, using Dave Eggers’ novel “The Circle” (2013) and Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story” (2010) as case studies. The article examines the transformation of the dystopian paradigm, focusing on the shift from state oppression to corporate behavior management, exemplified by protagonists forced to exist in conditions of total transparency and the commodification of the human being. The scientific novelty of the research lies in identifying the rhetoric model used by corporate structures as a weapon and revealing how ethical frameworks are reoriented to legitimize the extraction of human experience as behavioral data. The aim of the research is to determine the features of corporate ethics representation in the contemporary American fiction based on the novels of D. Eggers and G. Shteyngart. The article investigates the narrative trajectories of Mae Holland and Lenny Abramov as the examples of the subject’s submission to algorithmic control. The results demonstrate how modern corporate ethics is stripped of intrinsic value and becomes a tool for achieving commercial success.
Research materials
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- Штейнгар Г. Супергрустная история настоящей любви: роман / пер. с англ. А. Грызуновой. М.: Эксмо, 2012.
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Author information
About this article
Publication history
- Received: June 29, 2026.
- Published: July 27, 2026.
Keywords
- корпоративная этика
- американская литература XXI века
- Дэйв Эггерс
- Гэри Штейнгарт
- надзорный капитализм
- corporate ethics
- 21st-century American literature
- Dave Eggers
- Gary Shteyngart
- surveillance capitalism
Copyright
© 2026 The Author(s)
© 2026 Gramota Publishing, LLC