PAMLA is delighted to announce the 2026 Presidential Address, delivered by PAMLA President John D. Schwetman (University of Minnesota Duluth) at the 123rd Annual PAMLA Conference in Seattle.
Drawing together contemporary television, literary history, media consolidation, and economic inequality, John Schwetman’s address will examine HBO’s acclaimed series Succession alongside the works of Edith Wharton and William Shakespeare to consider the relationship between class, political power, and cultural production in our contemporary “Gilded Age 2.0.”
“Everything I’ve Done in My Life, I’ve Done for My Children”: Succession and Class Satire in Gilded Age 2.0
Friday, November 13, 2026
6:00 PM–7:00 PM
Columbia A (3rd Floor)
Across four seasons from 2018 to 2023, Jesse Armstrong’s series Succession dramatized and critiqued the global billionaire class through its portrayal of the fictional Roy family, which derives its wealth from its controlling stake in a global media corporation. The series’ success results partly from its subtle and persistent critique of the concentration of wealth into the hands of a few families and the parallel consolidation of media within the domain of a few powerful corporations.
Through a careful reading of Succession and its literary precedents in the works of Edith Wharton and William Shakespeare, this presentation considers the collapse of democracy and the stifling of the free exchange of knowledge that results from a second Gilded Age—or a high-tech-inflected “Gilded Age 2.0”—and how literary production might acknowledge, reinforce, or critique the dynamics of political power in the larger context of economic-class polarization in the twenty-first century.
John D. Schwetman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where he has taught since 1999. His article “‘There Is No Plan B’: The Human Factor in T. C. Boyle’s The Terranauts” appeared in Western Literature in 2021. His article “Out in the Street with Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Pinsky” appeared in Pacific Coast Philology in 2024, and his most recent article, “Luddites, Robots, and Console Cowboys,” appeared in the Journal of Humanities and AI in spring 2026.
He is currently working on a book examining the road novel and regionalism in twentieth-century U.S. literature.
We hope you’ll join us for the PAMLA 2026 Presidential Address in Seattle!