From workshop talk to workplace narratives: A corpus-assisted framework for labour, technology, and technical discourse in contemporary English literature
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Abstract
Contemporary English literature increasingly imagines work through screens, automated systems, logistics networks, algorithmic supervision, precarious service economies, and hybrid human-machine environments. Yet literary criticism often approaches these representations through broad thematic labels—technology, alienation, labour, surveillance, or posthumanism—without systematically examining the language through which fictional workplaces are made audible and ethically legible. This article develops a corpus-assisted research framework for analysing technical and workplace discourse in contemporary English fiction. It is presented transparently as a research-design study because the revised project does not claim a completed literary corpus or empirical findings. The proposed Contemporary English Workplace Literature Corpus (CEWLC) is a stratified collection of novels, short fiction, and dramatic texts published in English from 1990 to 2025 and selected for sustained representation of industrial, digital, service, logistical, scientific, or automated work. Corpus stylistics is integrated with narratology, speech and thought presentation, critical stylistics, labour-oriented literary criticism, and close reading. The framework specifies corpus construction, copyright-sensitive text preparation, metadata, narrative-zone segmentation, annotation of occupational roles and communicative events, keyword and collocation analysis, agency and modality, metaphor, characterisation, speech presentation, and inter-coder reliability. It also distinguishes fictional workplace discourse from authentic occupational communication: literary dialogue is stylised, narratively distributed, and shaped by genre, focalisation, and aesthetic design. The study’s contribution is methodological and interpretive. It offers a reproducible way to examine how contemporary English literature represents authority, risk, expertise, automation, responsibility, and resistance, while providing a basis for literature curricula that connect close reading with the cultural politics of technological work.
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