Class Underside and Ethnic Outside

Worldview ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 17 (10) ◽  
pp. 45-48
Author(s):  
John Murray Cuddihy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Evelyn Waugh ◽  
Education Act ◽  
Raymond Williams

Thanks to England's 1944 Butler Education Act, in the immediate postwar years a generation of gifted working-class youngsters like Martin Burgess Green (b. 1927), Raymond Williams, and Richard Hoggart made their way from the English provinces to Oxford and Cambridge. Green, author of The von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love (Basic Books; 395 pp.; $12.50), was one such scholarship boy—one of the “école de Butler,” as the ever kindly Evelyn Waugh would put it—who in 1945 went to Cambridge and read English, and who experienced the university's pervasive ethos of gentlemanliness as a form of domestic colonialism. He soon entered the circle of Downing College's brilliant F.R. Leavis, editor of the influential literary quarterly Scrutiny.

scholarly journals Memoria y Estudios Culturales Un acercamiento al relato sobre la propia historia de vida en Raymond Williams y Richard Hoggart

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 015-031
Author(s):  
Sebastian Matias Stra
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Historia De Vida ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Estudios Culturales

Este trabajo intentará recuperar, de forma parcial yfragmentaria, las maneras en que el testimonio en primerapersona articulado en el formato de memorias de lapropia historia de vida tiene un posible valor metodológicoen algunos textos seminales de la conformación de losestudios culturales ingleses.Hablamos particularmente del libro de 1957, The Usesof Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life, with SpecialReference to Publications and Entertainments, de RichardHoggart y del tradicional artículo Culture is Ordinaryde Raymond Williams, publicado en 1958 y que incluyede forma más rudimentaria algunas definiciones queconformaron la primera parte de la obra del autor galés,constituida por los libros Culture and Society y The LongRevolution.

scholarly journals Marking the Moral Boundaries of Class

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kirk
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Middle Part ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Heavy Industry ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Moral Boundaries ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Determining Factor

This article welcomes the recent renewed interest in the topic of class within sociology and cultural studies. This comes after a long period – from around the middle part of the 1980s and into the 1990s – during which social class was dismissed as a mode of understanding socio-economic and cultural conditions on the part of both academics and mainstream political organisations alike. Working-class formations in particular came under scrutiny, increasingly seen to be in terminal decline and fragmentation through the impact of post-industrialisation processes set in train in western economies from the turn of the 1980s onwards. The demise of heavy industry – steel, coal, textiles, for instance – profoundly altered working-class communities, transforming the material world and cultural life of the British working class, powerful developments reinforcing the ‘end of class’ debate. Allied to this, the emergence within the academy of new theoretical frameworks associated with postmodern thought claimed to undermine traditional understandings around class. This article insists on the continuing significance of class and does so by focussing on an important recent response to the class debate, Andrew Sayer's The Moral Significance of Class (2005). This book stakes a lucid claim for the importance of recognising class as a powerful determining factor of subjectivity. While drawing upon aspects of Sayer's theoretical framework and argument to examine class experience, it is also the intention of the article to supplement Sayer's work by developing related theoretical propositions derived from the writing of Raymond Williams and the Russian linguist and cultural critic Volosinov/Bakhtin.

The question of progressive agency

Soundings ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (72) ◽  
pp. 48-64
Author(s):  
Michael Rustin
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
The Past ◽  
Recent Approach ◽  
Self Organisation ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Manuel Castells ◽  
Antonio Negri ◽  
The Way

This article revisits debates about agency: what and where are the forces and agents that might bring about change? In the past liberals and socialists broadly shared a belief in social enlightenment and progress, but liberals believed that this could be achieved gradually, through education, while Marxists believed that self-organisation by the working class was the way forward. A third, more recent, approach argues that changes in information technology are making it possible for society to shift from hierarchical to lateral patterns of connection. These three different approaches to agency are critically discussed. Among the thinkers discussed are Karl Marx, Raymond Williams, Eric Hobsbawm, Robin Murray, Manuel Castells, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The rethinking and renewal of institutions that modern societies now need calls for deep engagement with these issues, and both 'new' and 'old' conceptions of agency are relevant to this task. Part of the critical terms series

Cultural History: Where It Has Been and Where It Is Going

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celia Applegate ◽  
Pamela Potter
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Thick Description ◽  
Music And Literature ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Hayden White ◽  
Art For Art's Sake ◽  
The Impact

The very meaning of “culture” has gone through so many transformations over the last sixty years that it is necessary to take stock of developments in this field of cultural history before suggesting—with an eye to the promises and perils of earlier practices—what new possibilities might exist for the future of the field. The post-1945 period witnessed a powerful impulse to understand culture as something more pervasive than just literature and the arts—and as something more socially and politically reverberant than the shibboleth of “art for art's sake.” In 1957, at the very beginning of the modern practice of cultural history, Richard Hoggart'sThe Uses of Literacyfound the high and low hierarchies embedded in it. It focused on working-class culture (e.g., glossy magazines, films, “penny dreadfuls”), and on how reading was changing under the impact of mass media. By 1976, Raymond Williams needed to draw attention to the complexity of the wordculture, so extended had its purview become over the previous two decades. Linda Nochlin asked why they were no great women artists, and T. J. Clark, using a Marxist framework, sought to understand aesthetic modernism by interrogating the historic circumstances that had led to the breakdown of the academic system.The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt, came out in 1989. Its “models” for cultural history were the work of Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Natalie Zemon Davis, E. P. Thompson, Hayden White, and Dominick LaCapra, and its “new approaches” came from Mary Ryan, Roger Chartier, Thomas Laqueur, and Randolph Starn. These scholars were legislators of discourse and narrative, of popular and working-class culture, of gender, epistemes, and thick description. With many other tendencies, often defined by their focus on theoretical explication and elaboration, these approaches had the effect of deterring scholars from reengaging with the traditional interests—even theraison d'etre—of cultural history, namely, art, architecture, theater, dance, music, and literature. This turning-away also affected the very composition of humanities and interpretive social science departments, which added many new subjects of study but, inevitably perhaps, let others wither away.

From Syndicalism to Seattle: Class and the Politics of Identity

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Verity Burgmann
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
Corporate Globalization ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
The 1960S

In the first half of the twentieth century the labor movement promoted the notion of separate working-class values and interests—evident for example in American and European syndicalism, British interwar Communism and Australian interwar Laborism—and was thus identifiable as a social movement. Like the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this prewar identity politics successfully mobilized imagined political communities. By contrast, the retreat from emphasis on class difference and the turn to “equality of opportunity” politics, which Raymond Williams identified at midcentury and warned against, demobilized and weakened the labor movement. With class-based inequalities increasing from the 1970s, the decline of working-class identity politics ensured that the discrepancy between the objective importance of class and its subjective significance became especially marked. However, a newly forged identity politics of the world's economically exploited has recently reemerged in the movement against corporate globalization. From syndicalism to Seattle, we have witnessed the rise, retreat and resurgence of class identity politics.

scholarly journals Choosing Death: Working-Class Coming of Age in Contemporary British Cinema

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 746-768 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Dave
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
The Social ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
The Individual

Starting with Franco Moretti's hypothesis of a relationship between the experience of modernity and the coming of age narrative in the European novel, this article explores representations of the working-class Bildung in contemporary British films that can be seen as responding to social and economic changes generally associated with neoliberalism. Contrasting the emphasis on the individual negotiation of social space in the films of Danny Boyle with work from a range of directors, including Ken Loach, Penny Woolcock, Shane Meadows and Anton Corbijn, along with recent production cycles such as the football film, the article seeks to identify representations of working-class experiences, both limiting and liberating, which mark the inherently problematic attempt to imagine a successful working-class coming of age. In doing so, the article considers the usefulness of Raymond Williams’ class-inflected account of traditions of the social bond, in particular his notion of a ‘common culture’. At the same time, it examines how such representations of working-class life often emphasise the experience of class conflict, distinguished here from class struggle, and how, formally, this emphasis can result in narratives which are marked less by what Moretti describes as the ‘novelistic’, temporising structures of the classical Bildungsroman and more by the sense of crisis and trauma found in the late Bildungsroman and modern tragedy. Ultimately, the article argues for the relevance of the long view of the social history of Britain, as a pioneer culture of capitalism, in understanding these aspects of the representation of class cultures in contemporary British film.

scholarly journals THE CONCEPT OF “EXPERIENCE” AND THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS, 1924–1963

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
STUART MIDDLETON
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
New Left ◽  
Cultural Criticism ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
A Site

Despite intense scholarly interest in the “Anglo-Marxism” that rose to prominence in Britain from the mid-1950s, its intellectual lineaments and lineages have yet to be fully accounted for. This is particularly the case with the concept of “experience,” which was a central category in the work of two of the most influential figures of the early “New Left” in Britain: Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. This essay traces a conceptual history of “experience” from its emergence in Cambridge literary criticism during the 1920s and 1930s, and in the quasi-Marxist literary culture of the 1930s, to the confluence of these two currents in the work of Williams and Thompson. Reassessing the nature of each thinker's engagement with Leavisite literary and cultural criticism, and of Thompson's attempted reformulation of Marxism, it argues that recovering their widely differing usages of “experience” illuminates their distinctive conceptions of “culture” as a site of political action.

How Illiteracy Became a Problem (And Literacy Stopped Being One)

1983 ◽  
Vol 165 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Donald
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Sociology Of Education ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Apparatus ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
Education Act ◽  
Cultural Movement

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the conjunction of fairly widespread literacy with a new radical political discourse produced a powerful cultural movement in England. In responding to it, the ruling bloc devised new modes of ideological intervention which had significant effects on the shape of the emerging state apparatus. By the time Forster's Education Act was introduced in 1870, the political “problem” had been redefined in terms of the illiteracy, deficient language, and debased tastes of working-class pupils. This history raises questions about the conceptualization of hegemony and resistance in the sociology of education.

Green, Henry (1905–1973)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antony Shuttleworth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Fire Service ◽  
Family Firm ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Early Writing ◽  
Evelyn Waugh ◽  
The Family ◽  
Anthony Powell ◽  
Factory Floor

Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Yorke, a well-regarded novelist working in the mid-twentieth century. Living in London, Yorke worked much of his life as a businessman for his family’s engineering firm. He published nine novels between 1926 and 1952. In the later part of his life he was affected by worsening alcoholism, and became increasingly housebound. He died in 1973. Born to a family with aristocratic connections, Green was educated at Eton, which he described as ‘a humane concentration camp’, and Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell and where he published his first novel. Blindness (1926) examines the effects of a blinding injury on a young man’s development into an artist. In 1929 Green married Mary Adelaide (‘Dig’) Biddulph. Most of Green’s novels draw on autobiographical experience. Living (1929), a depiction of factory life in the English Midlands, is informed by a period Green spent working on the factory floor of the family firm. Caught (1943) makes use of his work with the London Fire Service. Although Green’s early writing dealt with similar subjects to his contemporaries’ (working-class life, the threat of war), it did so in distinctive ways. Living and Party Going (1939) employ an unusual syntax, in which grammatical articles are used sparingly if at all. The prominent use of gerunds (‘doting’, ‘loving’) is a noticeable Green trait.

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