ABSTRACT
Starting from the distinction between “career” and “job” made by Richard Sennett in The Corrosion of Character, The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, we can observe a progressive fragmentation not only of work, but also of the identity of the worker, who is forced to decline their “personality” (at least the strictly working one) to the needs that their job requires. In most of Europe, the arts (in particular literature, cinema, documentary and theatre) have developed a series of representations that attempt to measure, through a connotative-aesthetic approach, this social, cultural and, in some ways, even anthropological change.
In my brief chapter, I focus on three points: (a) an illustration of a theoretical framework (thematic-formal) for dealing with the study of literature that focuses on representations of work; (b) a brief presentation of Italian literary production that has tried to give narrative form to neoliberal work; (c) an illustration, within an isolated and well-defined case study (Vitaliano Trevisan, Works, 2016), of how the fragmentation of identity and the precariousness of contemporary work can be transformed into a narrative technique, both through a set of formal techniques, and from a thematic and content-related point of view.
