ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses a range of cultural texts, and explores how they have shaped our understanding of the metamorphosis of labour, the construction of social identities in and through forms of labour, and the impacts of globalization on the organisation and experience of work since 1915. It begins by reading Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella, Metamorphosis as a text that is centrally concerned with labour, and specifically with individual alienation from labour. It then analyses the aesthetic and political framings of two documentary films from the 1930s that seek to represent labour as constitutive both of the self and of the social, before turning to an avant-garde film, Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, that highlights and problematizes the temporalities of women’s labour. It concludes by analysing the representation of identity, precarity and labour under the pressures of globalisation in Ali Smith’s 2001 novel Hotel World and in the 2010 film, Made in Dagenham .
