Summary: My dissertation focuses on four traditional icons of work and non-work central to the rhetoric of work's disappearance: the factory worker and the farmer, whose “authenticity” haunts contemporary work structures, and the housewife and the poet, whose corresponding non-productivity serves to buttress the integrity of “real” work. Retaining these fading American figures as indexes for contemporary work only exacerbates anxiety about work's disappearance and enfeebles its conceptual development. Indeed, as the material counterparts of these icons recede from the landscape, an anxious discourse relying on metaphors of an abused human body surfaces in popular discourses. My project examines how contemporary poets redeem these rhetorically pained bodies by paradoxically embracing the violence done to them. Rather than despairing over postindustrial death and disappearance, poets as varied as James Wright, Rita Dove, and Susan Howe celebrate dying, tortured, and splintered bodies in order to acknowledge work's ongoing, and often violent, cultural transformation. Re-affiliating work with the organic body, however shattered or fragmented, these poets return to a more fundamental understanding of work: as human connection to and creation of the world—what Hannah Arendt calls the human artifice.