Abstract
This chapter draws on the concept of ‘immaterial labour’ to explore two key questions: ‘What is the work of literature?’ and ‘How might literary writing best be theorized as “work”?’ The activity of literary writing has proved peculiarly resistant to many theoretical and historical framings of and approaches to labour. The chapter thus proposes that the concept of ‘immaterial labour’ offers a new theoretical and historical framing that generates significant insights into the nature of literary work. Through readings of a range of modernist works, it argues that examining them in relation to ‘immaterial labour’ can enable a fresh approach to some of the ‘difficulties’ in theorising literary writing as a form of work.
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Notes
- 1.
This term was derived from William James, but first used to characterize distinctive aspects of modernist prose by May Sinclair in a 1918 review of a volume of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage.
- 2.
Roland Barthes notes in a 1979 interview, ‘Dare to be Lazy’ that Proust’s involuntary memory ‘involves a kind of idleness’, though also observes that ‘for Proust, writing was not a lazy activity.’ See The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980 (1985). London: Cape.
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Shiach, M. (2018). Coda: Immaterial Labour and the Modernist Work of Literature. In: Waithe, M., White, C. (eds) The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55253-2_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55253-2_14
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