Like all fundamental categories, work becomes ever more complex as we examine it more closely. The terms "work," "labor," "job," "employment," "occupation," "profession," "vocation," "task," "toil," "effort," "pursuit," and "calling" form a dense web of overlapping and contrasting meanings. Moreover, the analysis of work must contend with how histories of class struggle, gendered and sexual divisions of labor, racial hierarchies, and citizenship regimes have determined who counts as a worker and qualifies for the rights, protections, and social respect thereof. And yet waged work is only the tip of an enormous iceberg that feminist theorists call "socially reproductive labor"-the gendered, mostly unpaid, and hidden work of caring for, feeding, nursing, and teaching the next generation of workers. This collection of essays explores the richness of work as a linguistic, cultural, and historical concept and the conjunctures that are changing work and its worlds.

Jesse Ramírez and Sixta Quassdorf
Introduction
Rebekka Rohleder
"Happy People at Work": The Normal and the Marginal in Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last
Fabian Eggers
"Quality Time" with David Foster Wallace: Emotional Labor in The Pale King
Anne Mulhall
Impotentiality in Anne Boyer's Garments Against Women
Juliane Strätz
Revolt qua Passivity? Getting High and Staying in with Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Rita Filanti
A "Good Job" for the Animal Laborans: Mike Gold's and Tillie Olsen's Proletarian Novels of the 1930s
Christian Hänggi
Bezos v. Marx: South Park's First Real Labor Episodes
Johannes Fehrle
"Working the People, Working the Earth": Representing the Exploitation of People and the Environment in African American Slave Narratives
Simon Trüb
Precarious Lives and the Rebirth of Tragedy in Contemporary American Drama
Elizabeth Kovach
A Framework for Reading US-American Literary Expression in Terms of Conditions, Ethics, and Values of Work
Salem Elzway
Subliminal Gears: Racework and Robots in Cold War America
Eva Ward
Drug Policy, Labor, and the US Colonial Experiment in the Philippines
Notes on Contributors

J. Jesse Ramirez (Ph.D. American Studies, Yale University) is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of St. Gallen.
Sixta Quassdorf (PhD English, University of Basel) is a post-doc research assistance at the University of St. Gallen.