(Prognosis) Happy Bodies, Happy Hours: “Au Cabaret-vert, cinq heures du soir”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert St. Clair
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Discourse ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Class Difference ◽  
Political Role ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Working Day

The question raised at the end of Chapter 2—“what would a world without the poor being left out in the cold look like?”—finds a response in the poem “Au Cabaret-vert, cinq heures du soir”: namely, such a world would look like the modest utopia of a working-class cabaret, a space of pleasure, idleness, and community in which the brutalizing rhythms and discipline of the working day are negated in and by a poetry of the everyday. (Particular attention will be paid here to the prosodic and metric structure of the alexandrine, and the importance of irregular forms such as the “libertine sonnet.”) Foregrounded in this chapter, finally, is the rhetorical, cultural, and political role that sites of working-class “indisciplinarity” such as bars and cabarets played in Second Empire political and literary discourse on class difference and democracy.

Listening to the Old City

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-157
Author(s):  
Jacek Blaszkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Literary Community ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Old City ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Symphonic Cantata

The ubiquitous din of Paris’s street hawkers, known as the cris de Paris or the “cries of Paris,” has captured the Parisian imagination since the Middle Ages. During the 1850s and 1860s, however, urban demolition severely disturbed the everyday rhythms of street commerce. The proliferation of books, poetry, and musical works featuring the cris de Paris circa 1860 reveals that many in the Parisian literary community feared the eventual disappearance of the city’s iconic sights and sounds. These nostalgia discourses transpired into broader criticism of Georges-Eugène Haussmann and the discriminatory mode of urbanism that he practiced. Haussmannization irrevocably altered the Parisian soundscape by displacing, policing, and thus silencing the working-class communities that made their living with their voices. As an ideological device, nostalgia offered a counternarrative to Second Empire ideas of progress by suggesting that urbanization would vanquish any remaining image of what came to be known as le vieux Paris. An analysis of Jean-Georges Kastner’s symphonic cantata Les cris de Paris (1857) shows how representations of the urban soundscape articulated a distinctly Parisian notion of modernity: a skirmish between a utopian “capital of the nineteenth century” and a romanticized Old City.

Abdullah Quilliam

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Siddique Seddon
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Political Influences ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
Class Struggles ◽  
Legal Advisor ◽  
Shed Light

This chapter explores the religious and political influences that shaped Abdullah Quilliam’s Muslim missionary activities, philanthropic work and scholarly writings in an attempt to shed light on his particular political convictions as manifest through his unique religiopolitical endeavors. It focuses especially on Quilliam’s Methodist upbringing in Liverpool and his support of the working classes. It argues that Quilliam’s religious and political activism, although primarily inspired by his conversion to Islam, was also shaped and influenced by the then newly emerging proletariat, revolutionary socialism. Quilliam’s continued commitment to the burgeoning working-class trades union movement, both as a leading member representative and legal advisor, coupled with his reputation as the "poor man’s lawyer" because of his frequent fee-free representations for the impoverished, demonstrates his empathetic proximity to working-class struggles.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew S. Seligmann
Keyword(s):  
Corporal Punishment ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Alcohol Intake ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Push Forward ◽  
The Common

As this book has shown the common conception that ‘Churchill’s “radical phase” was cast to the winds’ when he was put in charge of the Navy in October 1911, although well established in the literature, is not, in fact, accurate.1 The radical President of the Board of Trade, eager to improve the lives of the poor, became the radical Home Secretary, no less enthusiastic for social reform, who then became the radical First Lord of the Admiralty, imbued with both a desire and, perhaps more importantly, a will to intervene in order to better conditions for those who served in the Royal Navy. Accordingly, he embarked upon a major programme of improvement across a wide range of different areas all of which affected the everyday life of sailors. Alcohol intake, sexual behaviour, religious practice, corporal punishment, as well as pay and equality of progression, all came under the spotlight while Churchill was First Lord. Of course, not all of the new measures were successful and not all were progressive in the modern understanding of the term, but all of them represented significant attempts to push forward a radical agenda for change....

Mary Barton

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gaskell
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Deep Sympathy ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Class Community

‘It's the masters as has wrought this woe; it's the masters as should pay for it.’ Set in Manchester in the 1840s - a period of industrial unrest and extreme deprivation - Mary Barton depicts the effects of economic and physical hardship upon the city's working-class community. Paralleling the novel's treatment of the relationship between masters and men, the suffering of the poor, and the workmen's angry response, is the story of Mary herself: a factory-worker's daughter who attracts the attentions of the mill-owner's son, she becomes caught up in the violence of class conflict when a brutal murder forces her to confront her true feelings and allegiances. Mary Barton was praised by contemporary critics for its vivid realism, its convincing characters and its deep sympathy with the poor, and it still has the power to engage and move readers today. This edition reproduces the last edition of the novel supervised by Elizabeth Gaskell and includes her husband's two lectures on the Lancashire dialect.

Richard Whately and political economy in school books, 1833-80

1966 ◽  
Vol 15 (58) ◽  
pp. 131-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.M. Goldstrom
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Royal Commission ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Hours ◽  
Richard Whately ◽  
School Books

Throughout the nineteenth century, books, pamphlets and periodicals offered widely-ranging advice to the working class. One theme, appearing about 1820, was political economy: ‘Next to religion’, a royal commission reported, ‘the knowledge most important to a labouring man is that of the causes which regulate the amount of his wages, the hours of his work, the regularity of his employment, and the prices of what he consumes’. And Richard Whately, former Drummond Professor of political economy at Oxford, now archbishop of Dublin, urged similarly the need to teach political economy to the poor : ‘The lower orders’, he said, ‘would not … be, as now, liable to the misleading of every designing demagogue … If they were well grounded in the outlines of the science, it would go further towards rendering them provident, than any other scheme that could be devised.’

scholarly journals Pushkin texts in the description of characters by Dostoevsky and Nabokov

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-57
Author(s):  
Elena A. Fedorova
Keyword(s):  
Vladimir Nabokov ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Literary Discourse ◽  
Prodigal Son ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Wet Snow ◽  
Queen Of Spades ◽  
Writer's Voice ◽  
Building Technique

In his novels, Dostoevsky refers to the Pushkin text to describe characters. For Dostoev­sky, Pushkin is an ethical and aesthetic touchstone; the writer’s voice is consonant with that of the poet’s persona. In some cases, the Pushkin text is embedded in religious discourse (the parable of the prodigal son). In interpreting the Pushkin text, Dostoevsky’s characters present and disclose themselves. The ‘dreamer’ from ‘White Nights’ invokes the Pushkin text to con­vey the values of his own. In her peculiar account of the ‘poor knight’ ballad, Aglaya is trans­forming religious discourse into aesthetic and mundane. Pushkin’s St Petersburg text, whose sign is wet snow, creates the space in which contradiction-ridden Hermann (The Queen of Spades) and Dostoevsky’s paradoxalists develop. The Pushkin code in Dostoevsky’s texts is what the images of characters are built on. It is a text-producing and plot-building technique and an element of literary discourse, of author-reader interactions. These techniques are used by Vladimir Nabokov in Despair and “The Visit to the Museum”.

scholarly journals Cenas da precariedade de ontem e de hoje | Scenes of the precariousness of yesterday and today

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-92
Author(s):  
José Edilson Amorim
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Politics

ResumoA partir de uma crônica de Bráulio Tavares, este artigo reflete sobre cenas da precariedade de ontem e de hoje. A primeira cena está em Lima Barreto, em Recordações do escrivão Isaías Caminha, ao referir a Revolta da Vacina no Rio de Janeiro do século XX, comparada às manifestações de 2013 e 2014 no país; a segunda é a espetacularização da mídia sobre as manifestações de rua em 2013 e 2014, e sobre o processo de impedimento do mandato presidencial de Dilma Rousseff em 2015; a terceira é uma cena da vida cotidiana de uma moça de Brasília em outubro de 2014. As três situações revelam o mundo da classe trabalhadora e seu desamparo em meio ao espetáculo midiático.Palavras-chave: Trabalho. Mídia. Política. Espetáculo. AbstractFrom a chronicle by Bráulio Tavares, this paper reflects about scenes of the precariousness of yesterday and today. The first scene is in Lima Barreto’s novel Recordações do escrivão Isaías Caminha (Memories of the scrivener Isaías Caminha), when referring to the Vaccine Revolt in the Rio de Janeiro of the 20th century, compared to the manifestations of 2013 and 2014 in Brazil; the second is about the media spectacularization of the street manifestations between 2013 e 2014 in Brazil, and also on Dilma Rousseff's impeachment process in 2015; the third one is from the everyday life of a girl from Brasília in October of 2014. All those three situations reveal the world of the working class and its helplessness in the face of the media spectacularization.Keywords: Work. Media. Politics. Spectacle.

Researching Air-Conditioning Addiction and Ways of Puncturing Practice: Professional Office Workers and the Decision to Go outside

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (12) ◽  
pp. 2838-2856 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Hitchings
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Air Conditioning ◽  
Ambient Air ◽  
Office Workers ◽  
Ambient Conditions ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Working Day

Though many people around the world now spend much of their time surrounded by bodies of controlled ambient air indoors, we still know relatively little about the subjectivities involved. Some have deployed the idea of air-conditioning addiction. Others emphasise the enjoyable sensations associated with temporary escape. The research described in this paper sought to add some empirical depth to these discussions by combining theories of social practice with a programme of serial interviews to examine how a sample of city professionals felt about the long periods they spent inside air-conditioned offices. The rationale was that, through these means, it should be possible to identify ways of disrupting otherwise habitual indoor existences and thereby discourage people from becoming increasingly reliant upon ambient conditions that are environmentally costly to supply. Describing their passage through a typical working day, this paper focuses on the moments when it might have occurred to them to spend time outside and how certain mental and material elements combined to impede the arrival of this decision. This exercise is used to draw out suggestions about how a better relationship between professional office workers and the everyday outdoors could be encouraged. The broader conclusion is that contextual studies which examine how places and practices produce decisions, instead of assuming individual people merely make them, have their part to play in fostering positive social futures.

Labour Woman and the Housewife

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Food Prices ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Way

The chapter discusses how Labour Party women engaged with the newly-enfranchised housewife between the wars. It focuses on how Labour Woman represented the working-class housewife and the degree to which it enabled her to speak for herself. It chose everyday domestic life, traditionally assumed to be beyond politics, as the way to connect with unorganised women in their homes. In its Housewife Column the relevance of politics to women’s daily lives was explored through domestic topics such food prices, housework, washing and making clothes. Even with the increasing dominance of recipes and dress patterns in the 1930s, the journal continued to see the housewife as having agency and a distinct experience shaped by class. For Labour Woman interwar domesticity was neither cosy nor rationalised and modern, it was a space which provided the means to engage with the everyday lives of ordinary women.

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