The premise of this paper is to investigate the relation of work, non-work, and capitalist structure in the texts of Studs Terkel and Charles Bukowski. Working specifically with ideas of immiseration and the “general law of accumulation,” and relying in part on Frederic Jameson’s conceptualization of these ideas, I explore how these two writers first represent a working-class that fits into these modes of capitalist structure, and then how they, if they do at all, manage to represent figures that break this “general law” and manage to exist, in a way, outside of the capitalist structure. I attempt to establish a difference between systemically inflicted unemployment and willful non-work and the ways in which the fiction of Bukowski and the personal stories in Terkel’s Working present that distinction as a willful rejection of the capitalist mode and its insistence on work and labor. Finally, looking closely at Bukowski’s first two novels, Post Office and Factotum, I discuss how, through the character of Henry Chinaski, Bukowski demonstrates the practice of non-work as a way for one to exist outside the boundaries of capitalist structure.
About the presenterEric Kennedy
Eric Kennedy is currently Assistant Teaching Professor at Penn State. He received his doctorate in English at LSU where he studied 2oth and 21st American Literature and Film. His primary focus is on the study of working-class literature and film and its representations of class, gender and masculinity, and violence.