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This chapter aims to show that the image of the world of work emerging in many contemporary Italian literary novels is that of an unrecognizable world. It focuses on the most relevant symptoms of a general and widespread sense of loss (the insistence on the “precarious lives” of “precarious characters” and the new representation of industry) and it highlights their strong connection with the main problems which have emerged in and been discussed by sociology, economics and law. After stressing the risks of thematic literary critique and by assuming that literary texts are by nature ambivalent and polysemic and that they cannot be treated as documents, the chapter proposes two hypotheses about the overall meaning of the representation of work offered by Italian contemporary narrative. Firstly, it suggests that the sense of loss that emerges from literature does not coincide with the one described by social sciences because it is not related to specific and particular aspects of the world of work but to more general and universal aspects of human life. In the literary imaginary, work is not just an economic experience or a relationship of exchange but it is the symbolic epicentre of the existence of individuals. The work of the past, which seems to be lost, is above all the world of a familiarity in which reality appears to be proportioned, measurable and recognizable, and the crisis of work is the crisis of a form of life that – thanks to the symbolic apparatus of work – used to appear as measurable and familiar. The crisis of the symbolic dimension of work entails a crisis of the daily dimension of life, conceived as the best compromise formation between the opposite meanings of modern work after capitalism has become the main paradigm shaping human relations. Secondly, the article suggests that in some Italian novels published in recent years (by Trevisan, Falco and Targhetta), the ideas of translating work into the symbolic cornerstone of life and to make of it the core-rhythm of all existence are both ideas which are claimed and at the same time kept distant because the sense of loss coexists with a sense of conquest.
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