1 The phrase “Brave New Work”, playing on the title of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 literary classic Brave New World, is the title of a popular U.S.-American podcast series hosted by the coaches/ consultants in organisation design and transformation, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans. Aaron Dignan has condensed insights from this series into the book Brave New Work: Are You Ready the Reinvent Your Organization? (2019). Both the podcast and publication focus on how organisations can shape happier, more fulfilling futures of work. “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 1 Elizabeth Kovach 1 Introduction Of the many aspects of contemporary life upon which the pandemic has left an indelible mark, work is one of the most prominent. During its initial waves, white-collar knowledge workers quickly transitioned to home-office arrangements, while Covid-19 infections and deaths disproportionately affected less affluent, non-white populations who make up the majority of the essential working class. This generated widespread public awareness and debate about socioeconomic, racialised divisions and disparities related to kinds of work, which in many cases became matters of life and death. Non-essential workers who switched to remote work adopted new daily rhythms and digital forms of interaction, hastening a flexibilisation of workspace and time. As Aaron Dignan writes in the foreword to Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? , “[d]igital transformations that were meant to take years were rolled out in a matter of weeks” (2023 [2019]: xii, original emphasis). Brave new approaches not merely to how to organise work but also to what meaning work should have in life are underway on a global scale as a result. The pandemic did not create but rather amplified ongoing developments and discourses on values, injustices, opportunities, and anxieties related to work of the past few decades. Well before Covid-19 spread across the globe, there had already been a surge in academic research, popular nonfiction, journalistic accounts, and manifesto-style social theory about the meaning and 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 2 To name just a few: Critical Social Theory and the End of Work (Granter 2009), The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Weeks 2011), The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Berardi 2009), The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work (Frayne 2015), The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself and The Death of Homo Economicus (Flemming 2015, 2017), The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty- First Century (Avent 2016), Not Working: Why We Have to Stop (Cohen 2018), The Job: Work and Its Future in Times of Radical Change (Ruppel Shell 2018), The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America (Cass 2018), The Robots Are Coming! The Future of Jobs in the Age of Automation (Oppenheimer 2019), and The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work (Baldwin 2019). future of work in the face of economic disparity, precarious labour conditions, digitalisation, and automation. 2 David Goodhart, for instance, claims in Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21 st Century (2020), that the votes for Brexit and Trump revealed “not so much a shift in values as a value divide based around different attitudes and institutions” stemming from different kinds of work, particularly in Britain and the United States (8, original emphasis). This divide is between a university-educated class of knowledge workers (head workers) and a class of manual and care workers (hand and heart workers), known as essential workers in the pandemic. Goodhart documents the ways in which the latter have become increasingly undervalued since the economy’s neoliberalisation in the 1980s, not just in terms of pay but also social standing, dignity, and recognition, which he claims led to the protest votes of Brexit and Trump - “an understandable reaction to a […] status shift that has been gathering pace for over fifty years” (ibid.). Sociologist David Frayne similarly remarks in his book The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work (2015) that: The social construction of work as a key source of income, rights and belonging is unswerving. Yet what is also clear is that, for vast numbers of people, work is becoming an increasingly unreliable source of these things. This is a profound crisis, requiring an equally profound re-evaluation of work and its place in modern society. (2015: 43, original emphasis) Both Goodhart and Frayne shed light on a growing gap between cultural ideas about what work should offer - “social standing, dignity, and recognition” (Goodhart 2020: 28) as well as “income, rights and belonging” (Frayne 2015: 43) - and what the social and economic realities for many hard-working people have become. According to these narratives, certain values and advantages surrounding work that were once given have been lost. They refer to a change 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 404 Elizabeth Kovach that has specifically affected the middle class, which as a social formation has itself fissured in the widening gap between rich and poor. If such ongoing developments, exacerbated by pandemic conditions, have generated a need to re-evaluate the meaning of work in contemporary society, what might such a re-evaluation look like? For one, a reconsideration of the meaning and values surrounding work should take into consideration a spectrum of work ethics and experiences that include those for whom work has historically never been a reliable source of ‘income, rights, and belonging’. The idea that work can and should lead to social and economic advantages has always been carried and perpetuated by privileged classes whose way of life was created, and continues to be maintained, by forced, illegal, or exploitative forms of labour. When questioning and rethinking the meaning of work in life, it is worth looking beyond privileged, prevailing notions of work as an essential source of ‘social standing, dignity, and recognition’ and asking what kinds of attitudes about work do those in states of dispossession carry with them and how are these erased, integrated, and brought into conflict with privileged ideas about work and its meaning in life? Kathi Weeks pursues this line of questioning in The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (2011), in which she interrogates theoretical and political challenges to the value and meaning of work, including Marxist-autonomist strategies of the refusal of work, feminist critiques of unpaid domestic labour, and political campaigns for shorter workdays. She identifies “dissident” approaches to work in “laborist, antiracist, and feminist” movements of the twentieth century, which she understands as “powerful weapons for change” (68) that nonetheless centred on inclusion into a system of waged labour and thereby often reinforced rather than disrupted traditional values and conceptions surrounding work. In other words, efforts were made to include those previously excluded from privileged value systems about work rather than disrupt and reinvent such value systems. Literary expression has been overlooked within this discussion, even though it has continuously and in various ways contributed to moments of re-evaluation and challenging of the meaning and values attached to work over the course of capitalism’s history. Little attention has been paid within literary studies at all to what I will call ‘literary fictions of work’, despite growing interest in the topic of work across disciplines within the study of culture. My contention is that literary ways of imagining, contesting, or codifying the meaning and value of work can help us rethink both historical and contemporary meanings and values surrounding work. They also demonstrate how dominant forms of and attitudes about work, on the one hand, and literary expression, on the other hand, are 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 405 3 I have developed this argument in a previous article, in which I also include an analysis of Herman Melville’s short story “The Tartarus of Maids”, to which I will refer in section 2. See Kovach (2021). engaged in a relationship of mutual influence. 3 I use the phrase “negotiating the meaning and value of work with literary fiction” in the title of this chapter to emphasise literary fiction as both a tool for reflecting upon as well as an active contributor to discourses about the way work is organised and conceived. To elaborate these claims, I will first provide a definition of and suggest a framework for the analysis of ‘literary fictions of work’. I will then discuss specific ‘literary fictions of work’ that pertain to the U.S.-American cultural context, discussing three texts that challenge and/ or absorb dominant ideas about work within their respective historical moments in U.S.-American labour and capitalist history. Moving from literary expression of the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s and, finally, to the early 2000s, I demonstrate how ‘literary fictions of work’ have continuously challenged prevailing notions and value systems surrounding work precisely when societal conceptions of and dominant kinds of work enter phases of rapid transformation. Such literary texts also negotiate the meanings and potentials of literary expression, which I will refer to as ‘the work of writing’. The meaning of the work of writing is negotiated in relation to the kinds of work that it portrays. This contribution thus proposes, delineates, and analyses the dynamics of a specific thematic category of literary fiction, ‘literary fictions of work’. The aim in identifying this category of literature and exploring various examples is to argue that it has functioned as a cultural tool for (and active contributor to) thinking through changing meanings and values surrounding work at various historical junctures. In light of rapid re-evaluations and reorganisations of work that have been underway since the pandemic, this category is of particular relevance today. There are new and expanding subfields of literary studies that are relevant for exploring the relationship between societal values surrounding work and literary fictions of work. While positioned most generally within a Marxistliterary, cultural-materialist tradition of approaching literary expression as both a social and material cultural process, analyses of ‘literary fictions of work’ are particularly enriched by newer trends in sociological approaches to literature, such as an increased interest in “open[ing] and extend[ing] the very concept of literary culture together with the understanding of who produces it” - i.e. with the institutions and actors such as gate-keeping critics, editors, and publishers (English 2010: viii). Another is an increased interest in the “social and institutional bases of literary value”, a topic often explored under the umbrella 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 406 Elizabeth Kovach 4 For discussions of newer sociological approaches to literature, see English (2010). For more on New Economic Criticism, see Woodmansee and Osteen (1999). See Brouillette (2014) for an exciting example of literary criticism that explores the nexus of literary expression and the logic of the (creative) economy. of New Economic Criticism (2010: ix). As my analyses demonstrate, such approaches are relevant to literary fictions of work, because literary fictions of work self-consciously position the work of writing in juxtaposition with the forms of work that are portrayed in their stories. In this way, they raise questions about the economies of creative production in relation to economic production in general as well as the value of literary expression within the broader economic and institutional frameworks that they depict. 4 2 Towards a Definition of Literary Fictions of Work I suggest defining ‘literary fictions of work’ according to three main criteria. Firstly, they are fictional narratives whose subject matter focuses predominantly on working lives. As simple as this first criterion seems, it requires a precise delineation of what is considered to be ‘work’ in the first place, which is no easy task. When used ubiquitously, work can mean all kinds of activities: anything having to do with a profession or how one makes a living, domestic work, emotional/ affective work, physically working out, artistic pursuits, etc. For more specificity, work can be limited to meaning an activity carried out for a wage, salary or other form of monetary renumeration. This is what social philosopher André Gorz has specified as “work in the economic sense” (Frayne 2015: 19; see Gorz 1989). Literary fictions of work, according to this sense of work, focus on experiences, values, and emotions surrounding waged or salaried employment. This understanding of work in an economic sense has rightly been contested, most prominently within feminist discourses, for the way it excludes unwaged labour that is essential for waged activities to be carried out in the first place. The wage relation that formed the proletarian and bourgeois classes continues to this day to depend on systems of oppression and exploitation - recent revelations by The New York Times on the prevalence of child labour in the United States are a case in point (see Dreier 2023). But this does not mean that the study of literary fictions of work defined in an economic sense would need to disregard the realms of unwaged, forced, or unfree labour, creative pursuits, and personal callings (artistic and otherwise), or even hobbies practiced during leisure time. By locating portrayals of work in the economic sense, these other realms of activity function as points of contrast and constitution for discussing the ways in which the values and meaning of work as waged relation is potentially 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 407 transformed by the criticisms of those disillusioned by its oppressions and by the entrances or exits of those excluded from its purview. By defining work as such, the pool of potential primary texts that classifies as literary fiction of work also narrows considerably. As Nicholas K. Bromell, the author of a book on antebellum literature and labour, observes, “when one considers that work is the primary mode through which adult identity is constructed […], one cannot but notice that very few novels or plays or films actually explore the work experience” (Bromell 1993: 2). Perhaps this is because, as Theodore Martin states in Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present (2017), “[t]here is a fundamental tension between the grind of work and the grip of narrative, between what novels strive to be (interesting and eventful) and what work is - plotless and monotonous” (163). A narrative that chronicles the minutiae of a given working day without any dramatic plot points or compelling storytelling devices built into it does indeed sound tedious. This reveals the cultural expectation that a literary text not simply mirror the tedium of our own lives but add a spin to it that at least entertains and, at best, incites reflection. The second criterion for my definition is that literary fictions of work negotiate prevailing ideological ‘fictions’ - that is, myths and prevailing cultural (mis)conceptions about work. In other words, they are not simply fictional texts about work but literary texts that address cultural narratives pertaining to work. They function as interventions in or problematisations of prevailing ideas, expectations and assumptions about ideologically charged subjects such as the role that work should play in life, the value and rewards of hard work, and so on. In the U.S.-American cultural context, dominant work ethics and prevailing myths about work have, since European colonisation, always been closely tied to the prospect (or fantasy) of realising the American dream - of achieving a successful, happy life through hard work. They have also evolved over time. In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks classifies dominant U.S.-American work ethics according to three major historical phases. The first phase is that of the Protestant work ethic so famously analysed by Max Weber as a spirit that fuelled the onset of capitalism. While the Puritans believed that individuals’ salvation or damnation was predestined and could not be changed in the course of a lifetime, they identified tireless devotion to work as a character trait of the pious and proof of one’s salvation. With the onset of industrialisation at the end of the nineteenth century, this colonial ethic had yielded to a secular, “industrial work ethic that dominated US society through the culmination of the Fordist period in 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 408 Elizabeth Kovach 5 Fordism refers to the break-down of factory labour into segmented tasks pioneered within Ford Motor Company at the beginning of the twentieth century; the term was coined by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks (1929-1935). Henry Ford’s methods of factory organisation were an outgrowth of Taylorism, which refers to the science of management developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s-90s to maximize efficiency and productivity. 6 See also Kovach (2021). the years following the Second World War” (Weeks 2011: 38). 5 Throughout this period, “the promise of social mobility” functioned as “the most recognizable rationale of this official ethos of work” (ibid.: 46). The third and current phase of the “official ethos”, which Weeks calls the “postindustrial work ethic” and is often also referred to as post-Fordism, emerged and has persisted since “the middle of the twentieth century” (ibid.). In this current phase “another element, present but not as stressed in the industrial discourse, came to the forefront of the new postindustrial work ethic - an element that characterised work as a path to individual self-expression, self-development, and creativity” (ibid.). This conception of work draws the rewards of work close to those typically associated with the work of artists, because work is positioned as an activity that should not be alienating but rather a path towards self-realisation and expression. In the next section of this chapter, I discuss three U.S.-American literary fictions of work that critically address different phases of this evolution. The third and last criterion I would name is that, in their thematisations of work on the level of story, literary fictions of work also draw attention to the work of writing and how it stands in relation to the work that it describes. 6 Maintaining the definition of work as an activity carried out for a wage or salary, the work of writing refers specifically to literary fictions produced by professional writers who publish and thereby monetise their work. Nicolas K. Bromell describes a dialectic relationship between writing about work and the work of writing that he also finds is central to defining and analysing literary fictions of work: a writer’s encounter with work as a subject seems to turn the writer back on himself or herself, to lead the writer into an exploration of the nature of his or her writerly work. That exploration, in turn, returns to the subject of work and informs the way it is represented. At the same time, […] the writer’s understanding that writing is work, and the writer’s engagement in the dialectical relation between representations of work and making those representations, can have the effect of shaping the writer’s actual work practice - why or how she writes. That is, a considerable part of both the content and the form of some literary works can be understood best as the outcome 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 409 of a writer’s negotiations with the relation between writerly work and other kinds of work. (Bromell 1993: 179) Bromell suggests that when writers choose to write about work, the subject matter of the work influences the very process of writing. Because the topic of work inherently raises questions about how the work of writing stands in relation to it, literary fictions of work tend to display high degrees of self-reflexivity. I will even suggest that the stylistic and formal choices that shape fictions of work can be read as the self-conscious positioning of the work of writing in relation to the work it describes. The work of writing has since its beginnings been most predominantly understood and positioned as an unalienated, creative pursuit emanating from an autonomous individual, which thereby often stands in contrast to forms of alienating labour it portrays. With the onset of the postindustrial work ethic, however, in which the rewards of blueand white-collar work are equated with those formerly reserved for artistic practice, the distance from other forms of work and the autonomy of literary expression lose sway. These propositions will be further elaborated via the case studies presented in the next section. 3 From ‘cogs’ to The Circle: Exemplary U.S.-American Literary Fictions of Work The history of the work of writing within the U.S.-American cultural context is unique, as it took quite some time after the country’s founding for a U.S.-American literary market to develop and the writing of literary fiction to become a viable profession. The main reason for this slow development was that, before an international copyright law was passed in 1830, regulations allowed American booksellers to print large numbers of English books and sell them cheaply without paying royalties. There was little incentive for publishers to produce books by American writers and pay them the required royalties when pirated British books yielded high profits. (Elliot 2010: 9) Once the copyright law was passed, it did not take long for U.S.-American authors such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe to establish readerships worldwide (see ibid.). The period of literary history often referred to as the American Renaissance of the mid-nineteenth century was a moment in which prominent white, male authors of the middle class (Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau), many of whom belonged 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 410 Elizabeth Kovach 7 On the American Renaissance, see Matthiessen (1968 [1941]). to the transcendentalist movement, set an agenda for establishing a uniquely U.S.-American literary tradition. 7 The professionalisation of writing was also enabled by a shift away from Puritan to industrial work ethics. Because the New England Puritans believed in hard work as proof of one’s salvation, reading and writing were strictly limited to the consumption and production of devotional texts: “Within Calvinist logic, the only important book was the Bible, and the words of humans were of little consequence except to explicate the truths of the scriptures and instruct others in Calvinist theology” (Elliot 2010: 19). By the mid-nineteenth-century, however, the meaning and value of work were aligned with secular, material aims. As Daniel Rodgers chronicles in The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (2008), “[p]raise of work in the mid-nineteenth century was strongest among the middling, largely Protestant, property-owning classes” (14), who had a “hold over the strategic institutions of economics and culture. Business enterprise was theirs. […] So were the institutions of learning: the schools and colleges, the nation’s publishing houses, and the major journals of opinion” (ibid.: 16). In popular culture, the nineteenth-century notion that “work was the highroad to independence, wealth, and status” found “endless repetition” (ibid.: 12); “[i]t would be difficult to exaggerate the ubiquity of this hireling-tocapitalist formula in the popular literature of the North”, emblematised by the fictional tales for young boys by Horatio Alger (ibid.: 35, on Alger see ibid.: 39). Rags-to-riches narratives supported a belief in hard work as the key to social mobility - a central tenet of the work ethic of the industrial period. The work of writing was thus not only made possible due to copyright law but also by an accompanying cultural shift in dominant attitudes about the meaning and aims of work, including the work of writing. It was no longer limited to devotional practice but open to secular subject matters, thereby becoming a viable form of production with a growing market and a powerful vehicle for perpetuating the very work ethics that made its rise possible. While industriousness was celebrated by popular fiction for the masses, the mechanisation and alienating effects of emerging forms of industrialised work also became subjects of concern amongst public intellectuals and writers of literary fiction. In Walden, for instance, Thoreau worries that “men have become the tools of their tools” (1996 [1854]: 36). His retreat to a cabin at Walden Pond was an experiment in living a life in which one finds immediate satisfaction and fulfilment in the fruits of one’s labours. Writing is positioned as a prime example of such an unalienating form of work, whereas new “tools” threaten peoples’ 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 411 8 This argument was first presented in Kovach (2021). 9 The narrator says of his business: “Having embarked on a large scale in the seedsman’s business (so extensively and broadcast, indeed, that at length my seeds were distributed through all the Eastern and Northern States, and even fell into the far soil of Missouri and the Carolinas), the demand for paper at my place became so great that the expenditure soon amounted to a most important item in the general account” (1986 [1855]: 272). humanity, turning them into mechanised parts of the factories and economies to which they contribute. Concern about the effects of brave new forms of mechanised work on human bodies and minds, as well was the meaning of the work of writing in relation to them, was also a prominent theme within literary fiction of this period. A striking example is Herman Melville’s short story “The Tartarus of Maids” (1855), in which a middle-class business owner decides to visit a paper mill to see where the envelopes, upon which his business relies, are produced. When touring the factory, he is shaken by the misery readable in the pale faces of row upon row of “blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper” (1986 [1855]: 277), who “did not seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels” (278). Watching the machinery spew out its final product, he thinks: It was very curious. Looking at that blank paper continually dropping, dropping, dropping, my mind ran on in wonderings of those strange uses to which those thousand sheets eventually would be put. All sorts of writings would be writ on those now vacant things - sermons, lawyers’ briefs, physicians’ prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates, bills of divorce, registers of births, death warrants, and so on, without end. (1986 [1855]: 284) While Melville does not include the writing of literature in his listing, he draws attention to the story’s material production and the work that made its circulation possible. As Nikolas K. Bromell argues, the work of writing in “Tartarus” is framed as “a privilege that requires the exploitation of others. Writing takes place in a realm that is independent of, though covertly dependent on, the manual labor of others” (Bromell 1993: 74). 8 In crafting a tale about a naïve businessman - a figure of success in the brave new economy of the time 9 -, who is shaken to discover the exploitations that underly his business, Melville draws attention to the position of professional writers, also part of the rapidly expanding white-collar economy that is fully implicated in the dynamics of accumulation and dispossession that were accelerating at the time of the story’s writing. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 412 Elizabeth Kovach What is more, “Tartarus” is comprised of a juxtaposition between the work of the girls with the work of writing. For any work of literature, form and style can never be merely regarded as compositional aspects designed to convey the story. The vector of influence goes in the opposite direction as well. That is, the form and style of a literary text do not merely give shape to its subject matter but are also shaped by the subject matter they communicate. There are quite straightforward instances of this in “Tartarus”, such as the repetition of the word “dropping, dropping, dropping” to mimic the rhythm of the machines being described. But I would also suggest that, even more significantly, as a literary fiction of work, “Tartarus” exhibits choices in form and style that are specifically designed to position the work of writing. Melville positions the work of writing as an act of intricate craftsmanship that could not be farther removed from the mechanised labour of the girls it describes. Long sentences full of stops and starts forced by subordinated clauses, precise and poetic diction, and a high degree of (often cryptic) symbolism demand a slow, reflective reading and a consciousness of the text’s composition. The work of writing is displayed as a skilled, intricate, intellectual endeavour. Consider, for example, the passage in which the narrator describes his reaction to watching the state-of-art machine standing at the heart of the factory, which turned pulp into paper within precisely nine minutes: Something of awe now stole over me, as I gazed upon this inflexible iron animal. Always, more or less, machinery of this ponderous, elaborate sort strikes, in some moods, strange dread into the human heart, as some living, panting Behemoth might. But what made the thing I saw so specially terrible to me was the metallic necessity, the unbudging fatality which governed it. Though, here and there, I could not follow the thin, gauzy veil of pulp in the course of its more mysterious or entirely invisible advance, yet it was indubitable that, at those points where it eluded me, it still marched on in unvarying docility to the autocratic cunning of the machine. A fascination fastened on me. I stood spell-bound and wandering in my soul. (1986 [1855]: 284) The unusual phrases - “metallic necessity”, “unbudging fatality”, “unvarying docility”, “autocratic cunning” - used to describe the machine and the source of the narrator’s “strange dread” are just a few of many examples of intricate craftsmanship on display. While the style of writing indicates a concerted effort on the part of the narrator to capture his reaction to the machine, it is also a demonstration of how poetic devices and methodically constructed sentences can vividly render a complex cognitive and emotional response. In its depictions of a relentlessly precise nonhuman and the blank human subjects it produces, the story implicitly champions human production via its own style. The brave new white-collar businessman who narrates the story is rendered as a naïve 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 413 10 The Works Progress Administration was a New Deal programme designed to provide work to the unemployed during the Great Depression. It mostly employed workingclass men in infrastructural improvements but also included employment programmes for artists and writers. middle-class subject previously blind to the exploitations upon which his own success and standard of living depend. He reports being eluded by the machine. Yet the text makes the experience of this elusion vivid and palpable. It is ultimately a show of human literary craftsmanship that stands in full contrast to the blank work and workers it is employed to render. Now I will shift attention to a literary fiction of work that in many ways functions as a counternarrative to “Tartarus”, not simply by giving the girls a voice but also in terms of its positioning of the work of writing - namely, proletarian activist and author Meridel Le Sueur’s manual for writing and short story “Biography of My Daughter”, published together as Worker Writers, a project Le Sueur completed as part of the Minnesota Works Progress Admin‐ istration in 1939. 10 In the 1930s, with the exploitations of industrial factory work reaching unprecedented heights, “a new militancy and solidarity among American working people appeared” (Denning 2010 [1997]): xiv), resulting in strikes of unprecedented sizes in major cities throughout the country. At the same time, a new radical culture was taking shape, made up of “a new generation of plebian artists and intellectuals who had grown up in the immigrant and black working-class neighborhoods of the modernist metropolis” (Denning 2010 [1997]): xv). Proletarian literature had its moment during this era. This was literature focused on precarious working-class experience of the Great Depression, written by members of the working class fully disillusioned of the promise of the American dream. It often programmatically encouraged a raising of class consciousness and featured downtrodden protagonists rejuvenated by the prospect of social revolution as well as culminating scenes of a large-scale worker strikes. However, it would be a mistake to characterise all proletarian fiction as being only programmatic, didactic, primitive, or uninteresting from a literary standpoint. Especially if we read it as literary fiction of work. Meridel Le Sueur began in her late teens to portray the experiences of the working class, the unemployed, and particularly women for left-wing newspapers and magazines. She also wrote fiction, all of which was based on the stories of real people. Like most proletarian fiction of the era, Le Sueur’s writing is picaresque and episodic, lacking smooth transitions between chapters, scenes, times, and places. Laura Hapke, a literary scholar who has worked extensively on the subject of literature and labour, claims that such “constant presentism […] is a commentary on the conditions of the time. In such a world, working-class 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 414 Elizabeth Kovach authenticity means to keep moving and expect little” (2018: 134). She reads the structuring of proletarian fiction as a means of conveying the meal-to-meal, jobto-job itinerance that characterised Depression-era working-class life. I suggest pushing this reading further to include what such a form says about the work of writing. From this perspective, Le Sueur becomes a particularly interesting example, because in addition to her fictional and non-fictional accounts of the working class, she also published a manual on writing. Her advice for workingclass writers is to record the raw material of their daily experiences: You must not be afraid to write simply because you are not a University student or quit school when you were ten. The English language is to be used. Those fighting for their daily lives today are the ones that are going to need to have that strong, sturdy language for their use. They are going to be the great reporters, the great writers of the future. (Le Sueur 1939: n. pag.) Writing is to be done without any concern for its artful crafting. Its form and style are to reflect the colloquial, everyday language used in daily, working-class life. It is to be written intermittently, in short breaks from waged and domestic labour or job searching. A notebook should be kept close at all times for quickly jotting down the stories of the peoples’ lives. This work of writing is positioned as an act of reappropriation: Our literature which has been the possession of only handful of people, a small group whose experience has become more and more limited and parasitic, is changing to become something created by those who participate first hand in productive life. We are learning that the word as a tool is likely to be used best by the worker, the producer. (Le Sueur 1930: n. pag.) If Le Sueur were writing to the characters of “Tartarus”, she would clearly address the girls, empowering them to tell their stories that remain invisible to the ‘limited’ perspective of its narrator. As she movingly writes in the introduction to her book Women on the Breadlines, “These are not stories, but epitaphs marking the lives of women […] at the bottom of the social strata, who are trampled on, leave no statistic, no record, obituary or remembrance” (1977: 1). The work of writing functions as an act of witnessing and making visible lives and experiences that would otherwise be erased from cultural memory. This approach to the work of writing stands in radical opposition to what the work of writing that Melville puts on display. The work of writing according to Le Sueur should have nothing to do with intricate craftsmanship - with demonstrating the human ability for artful literary expression -, nor must it emanate from creative geniuses sitting in rooms of their own. It is a communal, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 415 collaborative recording of dispossessed lives, written by their subjects as they are being lived. The time and resources for reflection, distance or poetic rendering are not given nor desired. The worker writer need only basic writing skills to commit the raw materials of life to paper. Writing is not a rarified craft reflecting the individual writer but a basic learned skill that can give voice to the collective. In contrast to the example of “Tartarus”, which highlights an insurmountable distance between the work rendered in the story and the work of writing, Le Sueur aims for zero distance as a demonstration of solidarity. The language and experience of the worker writer is to be identical with that of the workers portrayed. Form and style are mechanical rather than painstaking. The work of writing requires the same skill level as the uneducated workers it portrays. In Worker Writers, Le Sueur concludes her manual with the analysis of her own short story “Biography of My Daughter”. The short story is presented with comments on its organisation and the functions of its component parts in the margins, to show prospective writers how to tell their stories. In “Biography of My Daughter”, a female narrator describes how her friend Rhoda came to her untimely death, after struggling for years to receive a university degree and become a librarian: She wanted to be a librarian. The first year she worked as a maid for only room and board, because her father paid the university fees, but the next year he couldn’t pay them, so she got a job at Coffee Dan’s and worked there as a waitress from six o’clock in the evening until two in the morning. From where she went to the Zaners, where she worked for her room and board. She got up at six, prepared breakfast, cleaned up, straightened the house and got to the university library school. Sometimes she got in some sleep in the rest room. She did this for four years. She was graduated. There was no library to work in. She worked as a maid, cook, waitress, then there was not even that. She was on relief. To get some kinds of relief you have to be examined by a doctor also. They found she had tuberculosis. (n. pag.) Rhoda dies shortly thereafter in a sanatorium. The narrator and a mutual friend meet Rhoda’s mother, who talks about how ambitious her daughter was - always working to be successful. The friend of the narrator reacts emotionally, diagnosing Rhoda’s demise as the result of a work ethic not to be emulated: don’t work too hard. If you get tired, you know what to do […]. Listen, Rhoda worked for a bitch, did all the washing, ironing, cooking, cleaning, eight people…Listen honey, if you feel tired, listen for God’s sake, if you feel tired you know what to do…there isn’t any success. Listen, there isn’t… (n. pag) 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 416 Elizabeth Kovach Here the prospect of realizing the American dream through hard work is exposed as a farce. For the women workers staring in Le Sueur’s fiction, there “isn’t any success”, no matter how hard or relentless the labour. With the prospect of social mobility obliterated, it is rest, not harder work, that becomes a defiant act of self-preservation that directly challenges dominant work ethics of the industrial period. Literary scholarship on Le Sueur’s work focusses mainly on the themes and narrative devices in her texts. I would suggest that her most radical contribution to U.S.-American literary expression is her intervention in what the work of writing can and should entail. The work of writing does not contrast with the work it portrays but aims to stand in seamless solidarity with the labouring subjects it renders. Its aims are more political than artistic, and it is performed in the trenches rather than from an ivory tower. Melville’s text generates distance between the inspired work of writing that it features and the mindless, alienated work it describes. Le Sueur’s text collapses this distance, suggesting that worker writers communicate on the same plain as the subjects they describe. The work of writing in the first case celebrates writing as a uniquely human achievement that is nonetheless full of blind spots and problematically relies upon exploitative structures for it to exist. In the second case, a mode of writing is proposed in the struggle to overcome such blindness and exploitation. Now I will turn to my third and final example, Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle (2013), a dystopian literary fiction of work that, along with its film adaptation, is so well-known it likely requires no introduction. It chronicles the professional assent of a young woman in a tech company which could perhaps best be described as an Amazonian-Metaverse. Since the novel’s publication, the world it imagined has become so like our current reality that it can barely be classified as futuristic. This is the most confounding of the three cases in terms of how the work of writing is positioned. The novel describes a historical moment and a working milieu that has fully absorbed what Weeks refers to as the postindustrial work ethic, in which hard work is believed to lead to personal satisfaction and self-realisation in addition to the social mobility and material gain celebrated by the industrial work ethic. The workplace featured in The Circle is not merely an office space but an entire campus upon which its employees’ work and private lives merge. From athletic facilities and organised parties to dormitories for those who wish to work (or socialise) late and cut commute times, the company lives by the ethos that the work-life relation should not merely be balanced but dissolved. The company lives by the belief that, when work is positioned as a fulfilment and extension of the self, it no longer feels like work but becomes an activity that 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 417 flows seamlessly within an entire way of life. The idea at first glance seems quite utopian - even like a fulfilment of the Marxist dream of a post-capitalist world in which work returns to an embodied, intentional, immediate, and satisfying expression of the self as opposed to the alienated activity of producing value for others via divisions of labour within classed societies. However, the model of The Circle represents the pinnacle as opposed to an obliteration of capitalist development. Both represent a completion, or totality, but are diametrically opposed. Mae, the novel’s protagonist, is dazzled by the seemingly utopian conditions presented to her. She begins at entry-level, within the customer service de‐ partment, replying to customer questions and comments with prefabricated answers. Her tasks are gamified, showing her ranking amongst colleagues and offering continuous rewards for achievements met. She becomes addicted to maintaining and improving her ranking, increasing both her hours and hourly output to a high level of intensity. Soon she catches the attention of the higherups, becoming the poster child for The Circle’s newest gadget and pilot project: SeeChange, a device that livestreams Mae’s entire life. She amasses viewers and talks to her global audience throughout the day. The goal is to ultimately create a society that is fully recorded to, according to the company, reach a state of maximum transparency and accountability. This of course bestows a chilling degree of power upon the company’s leaders, who can and do frame and destroy the lives of those who threaten their project using the data they have on these individuals. The novel is a cautionary tale about big data, corporate ownership, and privacy, while it is also a commentary on dominant work ethics of the postin‐ dustrial era. Work began to be positioned as an expression of individuality, creativity, autonomy and flexibility within management discourses of the 1970s. The U.S.-American economy had begun to slow as early as 1965, when low-priced German and Japanese goods entered the global market (Bernes 2017: 16). Companies responded by demanding that workers move faster and more intensely without pay raises and, as the crisis continued into the 1970s, by “beginning to attack wages and defang the unions that were reluctantly pushed into the fray by an increasingly combative workforce” (Bernes 2017: 16). When workers continued to push back, it became increasingly difficult for management to revert to methods of simply exerting more pressure and maintaining the hierarchical structures put in place since the industrial period. A transformation was in order, which, as Jasper Bernes writes in his book The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (2017), is predominantly referred to as the period of: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 418 Elizabeth Kovach “post-Fordism” (a term meant to emphasize both its difference from and continuity with Fordist and Taylorist methods), or alternatively “neoliberalism,” “flexible accu‐ mulation,” and “postindustrial society,” where each of these terms stresses different aspects of transformation. What matters for my argument is that […] aspects of the artistic critique, such as the critique of work from the standpoint of participation, became essential parts of the restructuring undertaken by capitalists to improve profitability. (17) Bernes suggests that artistic discourses that championed participation (for instance in participatory art of the era) generated the vocabularies and set the stage for the appropriation of such discourses within the corporate world. With the onset of post-Fordism, company management responded to worker complaints by introducing flatter hierarchies, encouraging employees to play less one-sided and more multifaceted roles in developing company ideas and cultures, increasing opportunities for participation, allowing more flexible work hours, etc. As Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello succinctly state in The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), the “themes” that were first generated within artistic circles and transferred into worker complaints were appropriated by corporate management discourses in an effort to placate unhappy workers; in doing so, they were absorbed by and used to strengthen the “forces whose destruction they were intended to hasten” (97). The ideal worker came to embody the characteristics (flexible, creative, critical) formerly associated with artists and writers. By framing the workplace as a creative, participatory environment in official company culture and communication, employers found a way to con‐ ciliate workers without losing productivity. As the plot of The Circle suggests, such brave new ideals of work often function as sly forms of exploitation. The following passage describes the moment when Mae begins to find her footing in the company: Mae looked at the time. It was six o’clock. She had plenty of hours to improve, there and then, so she embarked on a flurry of activity, sending four zings and thirty-two comments and eighty-eight smiles. In an hour, her PartiRank rose to 7,288. Breaking 7,000 was more difficult, but by eight o’clock, after joining and posting in eleven discussion groups, sending another twelve zings, one of them rated in the top 5,000 globally for that hour, and signing up for sixty-seven more feeds, she’d done it. […] She felt a profound sense of accomplishment and possibility that was accompanied, in short order, by a near-complete sense of exhaustion. It was almost midnight and she needed sleep. It was too late to go all the way home, so she checked into the dorm availability, reserved one, got her access code, walked across campus and into HomeTown. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 419 11 I have made a similar argument about the writing style of Eggers’s earlier novel A Hologram for the King, see Kovach (2015). When she closed the door to her room, she felt like a fool for not taking advantage of the dorms sooner. (192) Mae’s feeling of “accomplishment and possibility” after seeing herself rise in the social media rankings of the company have her hooked. After working herself to a state of exhaustion, she is grateful for the immaculate dormitory provided by her employer, a seemingly luxurious amenity that works to company advantage by encouraging overtime. Mae has no supervisors breathing down her back, yet this absence of hierarchy and freedom to work when she wants is replaced by a pressure generated by social-media-style measurements of performance. A system of alerts and rewards makes Mae feel as if she is intrinsically motivated to perform, though she is conditioned by the gamified structures the company has put into place. As the novel continues, the reader is led to believe that Mae will join a small group of employees attempting to subvert the leaders’ power from within. In a dystopian twist, the story’s last scene reveals that Mae has ratted these individuals out to the leadership and stands in full alignment with their promise of a world devoid of privacy, “replaced by a new a glorious openness […] Completion was imminent” (497). “Completion” refers to full societal absorption within the surveillance of The Circle - to the erasure of any kind of ‘outside’. This would include the absorption of artistic and literary expression as well and, in the world of The Circle, make critique that disrupts the status quo a thing of the past. Yet what does the novel communicate about the work of writing that envisions this absorption? As a cautionary tale and dystopian vision of current trends, it prompts critical reflection on the themes it describes, thus positioning the work of writing as a potentially consciousness-raising activity. In terms of form and style, the novel is comprised of plain language and simply constructed sentences. The reading experience is not arduous but flows. Its style allows for an efficient, neutral, and inconspicuous delivery of content. This plain language is the same kind of language employed in corporate literature and communication - easily accessible, immediately understandable, clearly structured (a mode of expression that AI chatbots have begun to demonstrate par excellence). In this sense, the novel exhibits the same communicative register as is employed by the white collar, creative class that it depicts. 11 This has been a source of criticism, most recently in a review of The Every (2021), the much-anticipated sequel to The Circle, which tells the story of a young woman entering the company with the hope of infiltrating and sabotaging its operations. In her review for The New York Times, Chelsea Leu writes, “for a 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 420 Elizabeth Kovach defense of nuance and unpredictability, “The Every” exhibits a startling lack of both. […] I wished, often, to be allowed to come to my own conclusions, exercise my own subjectivity - that same endangered faculty the novel mourns” (2021: n. pag.). Leu finds the story’s delivery to be too didactic and explanatory rather than achieve a subtlety and ambiguity that might better engage readers’ own critical faculties. In The Every, Mae has risen to become the company’s CEO and resorts to ruthless measures to maintain the company’s stronghold over contemporary life. While the novel offers a scathing depiction of the tech industry, it is also a vision of the dangerous directions in which postindustrial work ethics can be carried. Mae becomes motivated to rise in the company’s ranks, because she strongly believes in the company’s mission. Her work is much more than how she makes a living but her whole life, the extension and implementation of her personal beliefs. Her commitment to the job is not merely a commitment to developing state-of-the-art technologies but rather the devotion to an ideology and its global implementation. The novel imagines how total identification with one’s work can have horrific consequences. Perhaps this is why the work of writing that tells this tale avoids zealousness at all costs. 4 Conclusion: Brave New Work (of Writing) Literary fictions of work are rich resources for thinking about shifts in values and meanings that have surrounded work throughout capitalist history. I have suggested that the three examples of U.S.-American literary fiction of work presented here exemplify the ways in which the work of writing is negotiated in relation to the work it describes. This negotiation is readable via markers of form and style. Melville’s intricate language and complex sentences turn his tale about a middle-class man’s trip to a brave new paper factory into a show of human literary expression that stands in stark contrast to the dehumanising, repetitive work it describes. The self-reflexive elements of the story implicate the work of writing in the dynamics of accumulation and dispossession that were growing in magnitude at the time of the story’s writing. The work of writing is positioned as an inspired, unalienated, ideal form of human production whose very existence nonetheless increasingly depends on structures of exploitation. Le Sueur’s agenda for worker writers voids literary expression of highbrow poetics in an effort to recruit the working class in production that is from the people, for the people. The work of writing need not require imagination, inspiration or education but should rather speak the truth about working class lives and struggle, for whom work has never been a source of mobility or self-realisation. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 421 Eggers’s novels imagine the potential dangers of present-day trends fuelled by the tech elite. His stories focus on workers who have become the agendasetters of our day - whose tech products have profoundly affected the realms of attention, information, politics, and truth. While such elite workers might seem to be those who are lucky enough to turn their passions into true vocations and pursue careers intrinsic to their personal beliefs and talents, the story suggests that the fulfilment of such ideals can be perversely misguided. The work of writing that makes this suggestion is accordingly modest, telling a tale in simple terms rather than flaunting its own expressive potentials. Brave new conditions and forms of work are surely on the horizon, as postpandemic flexibilisation continues for white-collar workers and automation and artificial intelligence reach unprecedented levels of sophistication and implementation. In a dystopian scenario, disparities between a privileged, agenda-setting elite and powerless laborers will persist or widen - as narratives about the promises and rewards of hard work maintain a stronghold within cultural imaginations. In a far-reaching utopian scenario, trends in flexibilisa‐ tion and automation could result in shorter working days and policies for ensuring universal income, reducing socio-economic disparities and perhaps even relativising the value of work in life, releasing ideas about work from potentially oppressive fictions, and enabling new sources and models of social and cultural capital. Wherever current trends will lead, literary fiction and scholarship will continue to illuminate and negotiate the process, including the meaning and value of their own work. Works Cited AVENT, R. (2016) The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century. New York/ London: Allen Lane/ Penguin. BALDWIN, R. (2019) The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. BERARDI, F. (2009) The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). BERNES, J. (2017) The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. BOLTANSKI, L. and Chiapello, È. (2018 [1999]) The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso. BROMELL, N. K. (1993) By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America. Chicago/ London: University of Chicago Press. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 422 Elizabeth Kovach BROUILLETTE, S. (2014) Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. CASS, O. (2018) The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. New York/ London: Encounter Books. COHEN, J. (2018) Not Working: Why We Have to Stop. London: Granta. DENNING, M. (2010 [1997]) The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York/ London: Verso. DREIER, H. (2023) ‘Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.’, The New York Times Feb. 23, 2023. Available at: https: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2 023/ 02/ 25/ us/ unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html (Accessed: 28 December 2024). DIGNAN, A. (2023 [2019]) Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organiza‐ tion? . New York: Portfolio/ Penguin. EGGERS, D. (2014 [2013]) The Circle. New York: Vintage Books. EGGERS, D. (2021) The Every. London: Hamish Hamilton. ELLIOT, E. (2010) ‘The Emergence of Literatures in the United States’, in Lauter, P. (ed). A Companion to American Literature and Culture. Malden/ Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, pp.-9-25. ENGLISH, J. F. (2010) ‘Everywhere and Nowhere: The Sociology of Literature After ‚the Sociology of Literature‘’, New Literary History 41 (2). Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, pp. v-xxiii. FLEMMING, P. (2015) The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself. London: Pluto Press. FLEMMING, P. (2017) The Death of Homo Economicus. London: Pluto Press. FRAYNE, D. (2015) The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work. London: Zed Books. GOODHART, D. (2020) Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21 st Century. New York: Penguin. GORZ, A. (1989) Critique of Economic Reason. London/ New York: Verso. GRANTER, D. (2009) Critical Social Theory and the End of Work. London/ New York: Routledge. GRAMSCI, A. (2005 [1971]) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. HAPKE, L. (2018) ‘Literature and Labor’, in Soloman, W. (ed) The Cambridge Companion to American Literature of the 1930s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 127- 144. KOVACH, E. (2015) ‘Forms of Globalized Labor, Life, and Literature: Dave Eggers’ A Hologram for the King’, in Basseler, M., Hartley, D., and Nünning, A. (eds) Emergent 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 423 Forms of Life in Anglophone Literature: Conceptual Frameworks and Critical Analyses. Trier: WVT, pp.-199-214. KOVACH, E. (2021). ‘Towards a Framework for Reading U.S. American Literary Expres‐ sion in Terms of Conditions, Values, and Emotions Related to Work’, in Ramírez, J. J. and Quassdorf, S. (eds) Work: The Labors of Language, Culture, and History in North America. Tübingen: Narr, pp.-17-34. LE SUEUR, M. (1982 [1939]) Worker Writers. Minneapolis: West End Press. LE SUEUR, M. (1977) Women on the Breadlines. Minneapolis: West End Press. LEU, C. (2001) ‘In Dave Eggers’s New Novel, the Problem With Big Tech Is Us’, The New York Times Oct. 5, 2001. Available at: https: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2021/ 10/ 05/ books/ re view/ dave-eggers-every.html (Accessed: 28 December 2024). MATTHIESSEN, F. O. (1968 [1941]) American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MARTIN, T. (2017) Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present. New York: Columbia University Press. MELVILLE, H. (1986 [1855]) ‘The Tartarus of Maids’, in Busch, F. (ed) Billy Budd and Other Stories. New York: Penguin Books, pp.-271-286. OPPENHEIMER, A. (2019) The Robots Are Coming! The Future of Jobs in the Age of Automation. New York: Vintage Books. RODGERS, D. (2008 [1974]) The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920. Chi‐ cago/ London: University of Chicago Press. RUPPEL Shell, E. (2018) The Job: Work and Its Future in Times of Radical Change. New York: Currency. THOREAU, H. D. (2008 [1854]) Walden, Civil Disobedience and Other Writings. Rossi, W. (ed). New York: W. W. Norton and Company. WEBER, M. (2002 [1904-1905]) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Penguin. WEEKS, K. (2011) The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. WOODMANSEE, M. and Osteen, M. (eds) (1999) The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. London/ New York: Routledge. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 424 Elizabeth Kovach