Writing about work: being in and out - emblematic works and singular stories

Since the 1980s, literature about work has undergone a revival in France, with some critics pointing to a new literary genre or sub-genre based on the workplace novel. This article examines this genre across a range of recent representative texts, including the novels of Elisabeth Filhol, Michel Houellebecq and Maylis Karangal. The author of the present article is a novelist who writes about work and also a researcher writing a doctoral thesis on the workplace novel, and is therefore at a vantage point that is both within and outside of this genre. This internal and external position is intrinsic to the workplace novel itself, in that writers adopt a guise both as author and as witness to the social phenomena that they describe. As a reflection of a world of work in crisis, the workplace novel directly engages with issues of realist representation that can be found more widely in Emile Zola's naturalism, the proletarian literature of the 1930s and, more recently, in the nouveau roman of the second half of the twentieth century. This article will situate recent novels in relation to these romantic traditions and the testimonies of a world of work in crisis that they provide.