L’insonnia dei precari

«Wir schlafen nicht» di Kathrin Röggla e le forme di vita offesa

Abstract

The article analyses Katrin Röggla’s hyperrealistic novel Wir schlafen nicht (2005), and tries to retrace the conceptual stages of the text on the basis of the philosophical concept of “new alienations”. In fact, many of the novel’s central themes gather around the issue of alienation and of its metamorphosis in the world of the new economy: the question of the loss of meaning, the falling short of personal identity, the crumbling of the inter-personal network, the pathologies connected with the new jobs, especially the one of insomnia. Röggla decides to emphasize this estrangement also through the linguistic register and a very peculiar graphic choice, which inevitably draws the reader into the text, almost as an integral part of the personal pronoun in the title.