Literature and the World of Work

Really good article from The Guardian this morning about the interplay between work and literature:

Melville’s sailors, Hemingway’s soldiers and Roth’s writers - many of our greatest novels are driven by work. Yet few of us have such romantic occupations. Joshua Ferris, author of an acclaimed debut about office life, goes in search of the workaday world in American literature

Many of the great novels of the past either use work as a means to kickstart the story (Nick moves East to take a job as an investor), or they focus on what Ferris calls “way-of-life work” — sailing the high seas, for instance. Today’s work tends to be of the type Ferris calls means-to-end — computer programming, project management. His theory about the kind of literature-of-work most likely to appeal to today’s cubicle jockeys is surprising and enlightening. Think of fabulists like George Saunders and Kafka rather than realists like Sinclair Lewis or Tom Wolfe.