Rappresentazioni del lavoro in letteratura e nella cultura visuale
10.13125/2039-6597/5982
Il numero Rappresentazioni del lavoro in letteratura e nella cultura visuale si inserisce nel contesto degli studi sull’immaginario materiale e immateriale del mondo delle professioni e della sua rappresentazione in prospettiva diacronica e in diversi ambiti disciplinari. Gli articoli si concentrano sulla cultura italiana, tedesca e francese del Novecento e affrontano aspetti legati alle teorie e ai metodi di rappresentazione del mondo del lavoro, dell’impresa e dell’artigianato da angolazioni differenti, non rinunciando a sviluppare approcci metodologici ed estetici che provengono da diverse scuole del pensiero occidentale relativo al lavoro. Dal complesso degli articoli emerge una trattazione del lavoro nelle sue diverse accezioni – ivi compresi quella dello scrittore e dell’artista – che, negli ultimi cent’anni, si è sviluppata nel contesto delle teorie freudiane, marxiste e weberiane che, fra diverse altre, sono discusse dagli interventi raccolti in questo fascicolo di «Between».
application/pdf
2039-6597
5982
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urn:nbn:it:unica-29722
Valentina Serra
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Between
work
Representations of Work in Literature and Visual Culture
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
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Introduction
2023-11-27
2023-11-27
2023-11-30
2023-12-01
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1
Valentina Serra
2023/11/27
10.13125/2039-6597/5982
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University of Cagliari
2039-6597
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work
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urn:nbn:it:unica-29722
Representations of Work in Literature and Visual Culture
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13
             Representations of Work
         in Literature and Visual Culture

                      Raul Calzoni - Valentina Serra

Abstract
      The issue Representations of Work in Literature and Visual Culture is part
of the studies on the material and immaterial imagery of the world of pro-
fessions and its representation from a diachronic perspective and in different
disciplinary fields. The articles focus on twentieth-century Italian, German
and French culture and deal with aspects related to theories and methods
of representation of the working world, enterprise and craftsmanship from
different points of view without avoiding the development of methodolog-
ical and aesthetic approaches that come from different schools of Western
thought relating to work. What emerges from the articles as a whole is a
treatment of work in its various meanings – including that of the writer and
the artist – which has taken place over the last hundred years in the context of
Freudian, Marxist and Weberian theories, which are among those discussed
by the contributions collected in this issue of «Between».

Keywords
     work; alienation; identity; collective; exploitation




Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)
issn: 2039-6597
doi: 10.13125/2039-6597/5982
Raul Calzoni - Valentina Serra, Representations of Work in Literature and in Visual Culture




              Representations of Work
         in Literature and in Visual Culture

                        Raul Calzoni - Valentina Serra

      The topic of this issue of «Between» is work, the representation of
its imagery, its conflicts and its potential and often utopian ambitions to
revolutionise society. Work in itself as a defining element of human iden-
tity is a topic that has caught the interest of numerous scholars, be they
philosophers or anthropologists, sociologists or literary scholars1. In recent
years, Italy has also seen renewed critical interest2, as demonstrated by the
double issue 31/32 of «Narrativa» (2010) and the section “Il lavoro nelle
raccolte di racconti dagli anni Ottanta a oggi” (“Work in short story collec-
tions from the 1980s to the present”) in Issue no. 15 of «Ticontre» (2021).
      Over the last two centuries, the artistic-literary transposition of work
and the imagery related to it, a key topic in the nineteenth-century novel,
has become a core issue around which the discourse relating to the onto-
logical dimension of the human being and their role within society has re-
volved3. Work activity, be it fatigue or gratification, agro-pastoral, mining,
manual, bureaucratic or artistic, as well as the joy and/or the despair that
arise from its absence, are themes that have fascinated writers, essayists
and artists from every nation and every era. However, the focus of this
issue of «Between» lies in the twentieth century, the age of machines par
excellence, the moment that in the history of European culture marked the
definitive change of pace from an artisan and peasant population to a mass
of proletarians. Such a process and theme is still of interest in our country,
also with reference to the work of immigrants, as demonstrated by the
anthologies and collections of short stories that have appeared in recent
times, such as Laboriosi oroscopi. Diciotto racconti sul lavoro, la precarietà e
la disoccupazione (Labour Horoscopes. Eighteen Short Stories About Work,
Precariousness and Unemployment, 2006) and Lavoro da morire. Racconti


     1
         See Weil 1951; Terkel 1974; Hobsbawm 1964, 1984, 1998.
     2
         See Kocka 2001; Kocka-Schmidt 2015.
     3
         See Totaro 1998.


ii
                                         Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)



da un’Italia sfruttata (Work to Die for. Tales of an Exploited Italy, 2010)4.
This was a veritable anthropological turning point that occurred at differ-
ent times on the European geopolitical scene, under the banner of an ap-
parently progressive project, ascribable to the constitution of an organized
and industrialised civilization. Such a change posed a series of important
ethical, aesthetic and methodological questions, whose roots can already
be found in writings of Charles Dickens5. At the age of twelve Dickens had
been forced to leave school by his father to go and work for a brief peri-
od in a shoe polish factory in London and it was Dickens who played a
key role in introducing the theme of social conflict into the tradition of
the modern novel. A social phenomenon that was already recognised as a
part of the class struggle that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would only
fully theorize in the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848. It is not dif-
ficult to think that the English Industrial Revolution laid the foundations
for thinking about work and its drift into the alienation of the individual,
social injustice and mistreatment of young people6. Thus, in Dickens’ most
famous novels, which represent a veritable critique of the world of work
in the nineteenth century, the need for an anti-utilitarian education is al-
ways defended, a system that can give young ‘workers’ hope for the future
and restore that beauty that had been destroyed by an adverse fate and/or
irresponsible fathers who had sent them, just like their author, to work in
one of the dreary factories of Victorian England. Just think of the orphan
Oliver Twist, the protagonist of Dickens’ novel that appeared in 1838, a
true emblem of child labour and its exploitation at the time, or of the char-
acters in Hard times (1854), which opens, not by chance, in a schoolroom
in the imaginary English Coketown where the teacher Thomas Gradgrind
is questioning Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a circus horse trainer. Dickens
compares Mr Gradgrind, the model of reason and mathematics, with his
student who, due to her circus background, not only represents the naivety
and candour of childhood but also embodies the values of the anti-utilitar-
ianism of education and, at the same time, of work conducted in harmony
with nature.
      Sissy Jupe and the other female figures in Dickens’s work allow the
theme of the individual’s lack of active occupation as an annulment of so-
cial constraints to re-emerge. This topic can already be found in the great


    4
        See Laporte 2016.
    5
        See Menke 2018.
    6
        See Whitefield - Strauss 1998.


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German (anti-)bourgeois novels of the classical-romantic period, such as
J.W.v. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-1796) and, later on, No-
valis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) and J.v. Eichendorff’s Aus dem Leben
eines Taugenichts (1826), in which active life – and in a certain sense material
work – is opposed to reflection, to the contemplative life and the intellec-
tual occupations, which are elevated to the expression of true humanity.
The fact that, in the end, Wilhelm Meister led by the pedagogical and se-
cretive organisation called the Turmgesellschaft (‘Tower Society’) re-enters
the public sphere and the active life of the bourgeoisie is part of Goethe’s
narrative machine and stems from the author’s desire to defend, in a pe-
riod such as the one in which the novel was written, i.e. around the time
of the French Revolution, the ideal of an established social order, in oppo-
sition to any desire to disrupt the status quo. On the other hand, Novalis’
and Eichendorff’ novels, dedicated to the contemplative ‘work’ of the poet
and the artist, have definitively subverted the long tradition of the Ger-
man Bildungsroman, to which Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre actually belongs.
A shared and important fact that emerges from the thematization of work
in the literature preceding the Machine Age in Europe is the circumstance
that work has been approached from an existential perspective, i.e. in its
entanglements with the question of identity. In the long tradition of Euro-
pean Romanticism, work idealistically corresponds to identity, i.e. one is
what one does professionally in life; see, in this respect, the proliferation of
doctors, poets, artists and teachers that characterize Romantic writings and
art, as evidenced in various writings by E.T.A. Hoffmann, or in the many
works of the time that speak of craftwork, also through fairy tales, such as
the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812) by the Grimm brothers7.
      After the idealistic approach to the world of work and its characteris-
tic representation during the romantic age, it was Dickens who placed the
problem of the deprivation of the dimension of the individual’s identity,
because of certain economic, social or political conditions, at the centre of
literature. This would find its radicalization in the representations of work
in Naturalism and Verism in the works of Victor Hugo with Les Misérables
(1862), Giovanni Verga with I malavoglia (1881), Émile Zola with Germinal
(1886) and Gerhart Hauptmann with Die Weber (1892). Labour-related social
issues, moreover, also inspired the figurative arts of all times in those same
years, as demonstrated by the famous paintings The Third-Class Carriage
(1862) by Honoré Daumier, Idleness and Work (1863) by Michele Cammara-


     7
         See Zipes 1988.


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                                       Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)



no, Work (1865) by Ford Madox Brown, The Foundry (1872-1875) by Adolph
von Menzel, The Coal Workers (1875) by Claude Monet, The Ironworkers’
Noontime (1880) by Thomas Pollock Anshutz, A Woman Ironing (1884) by
Edgar Degas, The Potato Eaters (1885) by Vincent van Gogh, Washerwomen
(1888) by Paul Gauguin, For Eighty Cents! (1893) by Angelo Morbelli or
The Fourth Estate (1901) by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. Moreover, the
works that focus on women’s work8 and the use of manpower in warfare
are particularly significant – Stanhope Forbes, The Munitions Girls (1918)
and Henrietta Mabel May, Women Making Shells (1919) –, or those that re-
flect with particular clarity on the depersonalising dimension of factory
work: George Grosz, Ants (1920) and In the Shadows (1921), Diego Rive-
ra, Detroit Industry Murals (1932-1933), Laurence Stephen Lowry, Going to
Work (1948), Fernand Leger, The Builders (1950) and, on child labour, Bank-
sy with Slave Labour (2012).
      In the wake of Dickens’ novels, various works insisting on labour and
the exploitation of child labour, on the role of women in society and on the
working-class and proletarian-revolutionary struggle9, made their appear-
ance in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. This was when
a new perception of the world linked to a widespread artistic-literary sen-
sibility was making its way, fuelled by the themes of the decadence of the
bourgeoisie and its values, which were progressively consumed by the
Zeitgeist of a modernity that was overwhelming a geopolitical and social
order destined to be swallowed up by history.
      The so-called Arbeiterliteratur or workers’ literature10 is generally
linked in various respects to the world of the working class and extensive-
ly encompasses the artistic expression of all workers, including manual
and agricultural labourers. However, this term is used to specifically in-
dicate the writings of factory workers, which, especially in the first half
of the last century, focused on the subjects, recipients and aims of the lit-
erary expression of the proletariat11. The strand of workers’ and proletar-
ian-revolutionary literature, whose narratives were anchored on the one
hand in a factual restitution of factory life and, on the other, animated by

     8
        See Morini 2010.
     9
        See Marsh 2022.
     10
        The study of workers’ literature has recently attracted renewed critical
interest, as demonstrated by the works of Menger 2016 and Ferrari 2019. For
an analysis of the characteristics of proletarian-revolutionary literature, see Frie-
drich’s extensive study published in 1981.
     11
        See Chiellino 1995 e 2000.


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Raul Calzoni - Valentina Serra, Representations of Work in Literature and in Visual Culture



the ideals of Marxism, thematised class unity as a counter-offensive to ex-
ploitation by capitalists12. It is an artistic production that, during the 1920s
and 1930s, aims to promote a real change in society, binding itself, some-
times in a paradoxical manner, to the cultural heritage of the bourgeoisie.
This created a literary season steeped in idealism and political pragmatism
which, precisely because of its utopian and ideological ambitions, ended
up taking on social cohesion and transnational objectives with contro-
versial implications13. While, on the one hand, such literary production
shows its rootedness in the cultural heritage of bourgeois extraction, the
developments in workers’ literature reveal the introduction of a significant
‘perspective from below’ that will mature into a more direct – and, in this
sense, ‘revolutionary’ – representation of reality compared to the canons
of Realism. The discussions that have matured around the potential of a
literature written by and for the proletariat are especially focused on the
very possibility that the workers can acquire – and spread – their own
culture. The very ambition to create a workers’ literary expression can in
itself be considered an act of revolution and rebellion and, indeed, scholars
like György Lukács accused the first autobiographical accounts of factory
workers’ lives of falling into line with the dimension of a ‘case study’ to be
offered to the bourgeois class which then edited editions of the very works
that were prohibitive for the proletariat themselves. Worker writers, for
their part, are often proudly aware of their dual identity as workers and
artists and devote themselves to writing with the ambition of producing
works that today would be called culturally, politically and socially ‘en-
gaged’. This was a change of episteme that had an impact on the world in
all its complexity, affecting traditions, arts and crafts from East to West,
underlined by the fact that the crisis in the world of work also forms the
backdrop to the narrative of the novels by Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906),
Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901), Jack London with the dystopian drifts
of The Iron Heel (1907) and with Martin Eden (1909), up to Maksim Gor’kij
with Mother (1902).
      These works also reveal a specific interpretation of work that is not
only narrated as a value or residual of an individual or collective identi-
ty, but which also becomes the subject of a psychological reflection that,
with the help of Sigmund Freud’s contemporary discoveries, insists on the
worker’s alienation and its impact on individual personality traits. Nicole


     12
          See Gallas 1974.
     13
          On this topic, see also Serra 2023.


vi
                                         Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)



Siri moves in this context with her article published in this issue of «Be-
tween» and dedicated to the formulation of some hypotheses on the Freud-
ian theory of the representation of work in the novel genre. In particular,
the article uses a theoretical perspective to explore the problem of the rep-
resentation of labour in the genre of the novel and discusses «the plain-
ness and iterativeness of work», two aspects that, according to James Agee
(2019), make it a particularly complicated narrative theme. By offering a
meta-psychological reading of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism (1904), the contribution advances an interpretation of capitalist
ethics from a psychoanalytic conceptual framework, and then discusses
Francesco Orlando’s Per una teoria freudiana della letteratura (For a Freudian
Theory of Literature, 1987), his notion of the «return of the repressed» and
his theorisation of the representation of «obsolete objects».
      If it is true that unserviceable and forgotten objects convey the «re-
turn of the repressed», in La vita delle cose (The Life of Things) Remo Bodei
dialogues with Francesco Orlando and his monographic work, Gli oggetti
desueti nelle immagini della letteratura (The Obsolete Objects in the Images of
Literature, 1993). As he writes:

        To a greater or lesser extent, we all give meaning to things, but only
     artists do this methodically and according to particular techniques and
     research paths. They give mute things their own voice and sometimes, as
     with children, even pretend to make them speak […]. Each generation is
     surrounded by a particular landscape of objects that define an epoch thanks
     to the patinas, signs and aroma of the time of their birth and modification.
     In their own way, objects grow and decay, like plants and animals, they are
     burdened with years or centuries, they are attended to, cared for or neglected,
     forgotten or destroyed. (Bodei 2011: 30: our translation)


     One author who was particularly fond of «obsolete objects», even
when dealing with the theme of the world of work, was undoubtedly Franz
Kafka. Mauro Nervi’s article illuminates previously unpublished aspects
of the Prague author’s production in the light of the concrete realia of his
writing. By choosing not to focus on the much-debated theme of alienation
at the workplace from which so many of Kafka’s characters suffer, he is
able to address the theme of labour relations in Kafka’s fiction, a topic that
has often been overlooked particularly by Marxist-oriented critics14. His es-
say examines the main occurrences of the theme in Kafka’s macro-text and


    14
         See Hughes 1981.


                                                                                       vii
Raul Calzoni - Valentina Serra, Representations of Work in Literature and in Visual Culture



focuses on the distinction between ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ work.
Nervi also investigates the theme in Kafka’s first novel fragment: Der Ver-
schollene (1912-1914). Here work is addressed in a more direct and in-depth
manner and with a meticulous realism that is rarely found in Kafka’s later
works, since its setting is in the largest capitalist society of the time, the
United States of America.
      Objects from the world of work are also the subject of Francesca Goll’s
article, which is dedicated to the epic of the collective in the novel Union
der festen Hand (1931), published during the Weimar Republic by Erik Re-
ger, journalist and later editor and director of the Berlin daily newspaper
«Der Tagesspiegel». The novel deals with the relationship between culture,
literature and industry – including the latter’s technological advances and
its effects on workers understood as individuals. One of the most striking
aspects of Union der festen Hand are the instructions for use placed before
the text, which reveal the cornerstones of the author’s poetics of the col-
lective, which Goll highlights in its aspects related to the world of work,
drawing on reviews, archive materials and also unpublished writings that
also highlight Reger’s literary theory in dialogue with the pamphlet by
Sergei Tretyakov Biografiia veshchi (1929).
      These are the years in which the question of work in literature became
a leading theme in Germany in the light of the process of technicalisation
to which the capital of the Weimar Republic in particular was subjected.
This clearly emerges in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) by Alfred Döblin, an au-
thor who, like Reger, worked as a journalist for several Berlin newspapers
in the 1910s and 1920s. The novel’s protagonist Franz Biberkopf moves
around an alienating city dominated by machines, the futuristic model of
which is depicted in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927). It is precisely the
literature of the Weimar Republic that, in the face of an extremely serious
economic, social and political crisis, proposed a varied artistic and liter-
ary production hinged on a representation of the working dimension of
characters who were grappling with the drama of survival in an extremely
hostile and problematic metropolitan reality15. The great novels of the Neue
Sachlichkeit have often been investigated in the light of an innovative com-
positional practice that can be likened to the technique of film editing and
a singular ability to restore the critical dimension of the Weimar Republic’s
reality. As is well known, these works explore the liminal dimension of
individuals forced to the margins of a society, dominated by the capitalist


       15
            See Ponzi, Guerra, Padularosa 2019.


viii
                                    Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)



principles of mechanisation and productivity, which leads to the weaken-
ing of the workers’ social function and, consequently, to the destruction
of their very reason for existing. Hence filmic and literary representations
of that time – such as Walther Ruttmann’s masterpiece, Berlin. Sinfonie der
Großstadt (1927) and, among the various fictional examples, Döblin’s Berlin
Alexanderplatz and Hans Fallada’s Kleiner Mann, was nun? (1932) – juxta-
pose in perfect intermedial harmony a swarming crowd of workers along-
side herds or flocks of animals destined for slaughter, or various figures
of office workers forced into a repetitive and exhausting work with exotic
animals in the Berlin zoo or dogs set upon each other by masters who keep
them firmly on a leash. In the words of Johannes Pinneberg, the protago-
nist of Fallada’s novel, those who sit in the small Tiergarten – a real little
zoo – are the harmless, starved, hopeless ‘beasts of the proletariat’16. In the
years leading up to the Second World War, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and
Man (1937), Archibald J. Cronin’s The Citadel (1937) and George Orwell’s
The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) will deal with alienating cities and jobs that
wear down the psyche and frustrate the desires and expectations of the
individual.
      Even after the Second World War, the risks of the reification of the self
in the workplace innervated the artistic-literary discourse, as is demon-
strated by Niccolò Amelii’s article dedicated to corporate work between
neo-feudal dynamics and liturgical rituals. The essay offers an articulate
critical aperçu focused on the ‘objectification’ of man in Goffredo Parise’s Il
padrone (1965). At the beginning of the 1960s, Parise embraced a neo-Dar-
winian vision of individual and collective existence, which was reflected
in the motifs of his texts, within which alienation germinates from man’s
biological substratum, where the law of the natural selection of the strong-
est is inscribed. In the light of these methodological premises, the essay not
only analyses the unravelling of the process of the ‘objectification’ of the
individual in Parise’s production, a phenomenon that was characteristic
of the advanced phase of the neo-capitalist system, but also examines the
modes of expression through which his novel discusses the transition from
«natural man» to «artificial man».
      The tension between «natural» and «artificial» is also emphasized
in Irene Cecchini’s article that analyses the representation of work on the
basis of its profound relationship to environmental issues and ecological
thinking. By means of an eco-poetic analysis of Simona Vinci’s Strada Pro-


    16
         Fallada 2019.


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Raul Calzoni - Valentina Serra, Representations of Work in Literature and in Visual Culture



vinciale Tre (2007), the author focuses on the interrelation between the act
of working and environmental changes on the one hand, and the potential
power of work-related ecological images on the other. The first aspect is
investigated in the light of the effects caused by capitalist «re-production»
(Ongaro 2001) on the body-work and the body-earth. The second is ana-
lysed through three different narrative processes that characterise Vinci’s
novel: immersive walking, natural and anthropic rhythms, and the social
and spatial aspects of mobile practices.
      An ecocritical, indeed even ecofeminist, approach to the work also
emerges from the analysis of Martine Sonnet’s Atelier 62 (2008). Raissa Fur-
lanetto Cardoso’s article in this issue of «Between» interprets the social
phenomena represented in the story, also in the light of reflections drawn
from Marxist theorists and the so-called “ethics of care”, with the intention
of criticising capitalist logic and its blind pursuit of economic growth, with
no thought for the individual. At the centre of the analysis is Martine Son-
net’s father, a former craftsman who never said anything about his work
as a metalworker at Renault in Billancourt. Through the analysis of how
work is represented in the text and its impact on this man’s life, the article
aims to provide some possible interpretations of the metalworker’s silence,
investigating its origin in the physical and psychological traumas he had
suffered in the process of the ‘proletarisation’ of the artisan but without
forgetting the fact that the alienating distance between the individual and
the sphere of social production had been created by the man’s profession.
      The theme of the ‘proletarianisation’ of the craftsman also emerges
from the second article in this issue of «Between» which discusses the
contemporary French-speaking author, Michel Houellebecq. In his Joy-
cean-inspired essay a «Portrait of the Artist as a Worker», Aldo Baratta
traces the «aesthetic postures», i.e. the transformations that the aesthetic
craft undergoes within the late capitalist and post-Fordist logic, through a
reading of the French writer’s La carte et le territoire (2010). Faced with an
artistic product that has spread beyond the worst expectations of the tech-
nical reproducibility so feared by the historical avant-gardes of the early
20th century17, the art market in which the artist operates today responds
to unprecedented hierarchies of value and assumes a professional habitus
fuelled by a new deontology. In Houellebecq’s novel, one can observe the
professional attitudes of three different artists: the photographer and paint-
er Jed Martin, the autofiction writer Michel Houellebecq and – through a


     17
          See Guerra, Blanco, Padularosa 2020.


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                                        Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)



metanarrative refraction – the real Michel Houellebecq. All three speak of
the professionalisation of artistic activity through a dialectic that oscillates
between the poles of craft and industrial work, but also those of creativity
and reproducibility.
      A central theme in contemporary artistic creation is work in all its
declinations from manual and artisanal to immaterial or linked to the era
of computerization and the reflections thereon, above all those centred
around the great social and trade union demands. Work is at the centre of
the literary reflection that denounces the exploitation of minors (Dominiq-
ue Manotti, Sombre Sentier, 2010), the precarious work of legal and ille-
gal immigrants (Marco Rovelli, Servi, 2009; Douglas Coupland, Microserfs,
1995; Alessandro Leogrande, Uomini e caporali, 2016) or the tragic white
deaths (Marco Rovelli, Lavorare uccide, 2008). Of course, it is also a key
topic in cinema, in the critical representation of the relationship between
human beings and work, in its alienating tendencies, anticipated by Char-
lie Chaplin with Modern Times (1936) and oppressive tendencies (Michael
Winterbottom, In This World, 2002, Francesca Comencini, Mi piace lavorare
– mobbing, 2003), in trade union and libertarian demands (Andrzej Wajda,
Człowiek z żelaza, Man of Iron, 1981; Mark Herman, Brassed Off, 1996), or in
the alienating dimension of unemployment (Peter Cattaneo, The Full Monty,
1997; Ken Loach, Riff raff and The Navigators, 2001)18. Dramaturgy has also
contributed to the theme of work, as Alessandra Goggio demonstrates in
her article dedicated to the German theatre collective Rimini Protokoll. The
group tackles the representation of work in performative and interactive
shows, which the author investigates by focusing on the performance Ge-
sellschaftsmodell Großbaustelle. By ironically resorting to different theatrical
traditions, the performance by the Rimini Protokoll theatre aims to counter-
act the alienation and depersonalization brought about by the mechanisms


    18
          Still in the context of visual culture, comics (Ernest Riebe, Mr Block, 1919)
and graphic novels are also particularly interesting in this context, since they often
focus on the representation of the historical demands of the working class (Gerry
Hunt, 1913. Larkin’s Labor War, 2013; Graphic History Collective, Direct Action Gets
the Goods: A Graphic History of the Strike in Canada, 2019; Graphic History Collective,
David Lester, 1919: A Graphic History of the Winnipeg General Strike, 2019; Graphic
History Collective, Paul Buhle, Drawn to Change: Graphic Histories of Working-Class
Struggle, 2016; Robin Folvik, Sean Carleton, Mark Leier, Sam Bradd, Trevor McK-
illigan, May Day: A Graphic History of Protest, 2012; Sean Michael Wilson, Robert S.
Brown, The Many Not The Few, 2018; Paul M. Buhle, Nicole Schulman, Wobblies! A
Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World, 2005).


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Raul Calzoni - Valentina Serra, Representations of Work in Literature and in Visual Culture



that regulate post-capitalist work. In the wake of what had happened be-
fore the fall of the Berlin Wall, particularly in the German Democratic Re-
public19, the group’s aim is to rehabilitate work – including theatrical work
– as a truly productive dimension of man, but also to encourage a reflection
on the condition of (post)modern homo laborans.
      The latter topic and its television mise en abyme is addressed in de-
tail in Matteo Macaluso’s article which closes this issue of «Between». The
scholar analyses the Italian adaptation of the television series Undercover
Boss (Boss in incognito in the Italian translation) which is unusual as it is
one of the very few TV shows focused on the theme of work. The show has
been aired during prime time on the RAI (Italian Radio and Television)
since 2014 and the essay addresses the series as a source of investigation
of the power dynamics between the boss and his employees that exist in
the working world. It also explores how, in a similar way to the original
format, Boss in incognito provides Italian viewers with a narrative of these
norms that is not free from ideological implications.




      19
           See Calzoni 2018: 67-111.


xii
                                      Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)



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                                                                                    xv
Raul Calzoni - Valentina Serra, Representations of Work in Literature and in Visual Culture



                                       The Authors
      Raul Calzoni

      Raul Calzoni is full professor of German Studies at the University of
Bergamo. Areas of research: the literature of the classical-romantic period
(J. W. von Goethe, F. Schiller, Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann), the German Mod-
erne (Benjamin, Bloch, Döblin) and the relationship between memory and
history in the literature relating to the Second World War, the Shoah and
the cultural reconstruction of Austria and Germany after the break of Na-
zism (G. de Bruyn, G. Grass, G. Roth, W. Kempowski, W.G. Sebald).

        Email: raul.calzoni@unibg.it

      Valentina Serra

      Valentina Serra is Associate Professor of German Literature at the Uni-
versity of Cagliari (Italy). Her research focuses on exile literature (Deutsch
für Deutsche, Valveri 2001) and the cultural debate and function of intellec-
tuals in the face of the rise of fascism in Europe (Parigi 1935, Bulzoni 2005).
She also studies the forms of engagement in Austrian contemporary litera-
ture, especially in the work of Robert Menasse (Robert Menasse. Intellettuale,
scrittore e critico europeo, FrancoAngeli 2018).

        Email: valentina.serra@unica.it



                                        The Article
      Date sent: --/--/----
      Date accepted: --/--/----
      Date published: 30/11/2023



                              How to cite this article
     Calzoni, Raul - Serra, Valentina, “Representations of Work in Litera-
ture and Visual Culture”, Eds. R. Calzoni - V. Serra, Between, XIII.26: i-xvi
(2023), http://www.Between-journal.it/



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