scholarly journals Them and Uz: Harrison and me

2022 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. M. Francis
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Personal Essay ◽  
Class Culture

The working-class writer, having moved into a middle-class dominated field, often feels alienated from their old and new cultures – separated as they are from their heritage and not quite grounded in the new elite circle. The markers of working-class culture are much harder to define in our hyper-modern situation, and this exacerbates the alienation. This position opens up possibilities in perception and expression from those in the margins and off-kilter positions. Tracing the multivoiced qualities of Tony Harrison’s ‘V’ and R. M. Francis’s poetics, alongside biographical and autobiographical details, this hybrid article argues that off-kilter and outcast voices, like those in the aforementioned class liminality, are in the best place to explore and discuss the difficult to navigate cultures, communities and identities. This fusion of personal essay, poetry and literary criticism considers the unusual, marginal and liminal positioning of working-class writers, researchers and academics.

Working-Class Culture as Political Participation: Reading Trump as Revolt Against a Middle-Class Public Sphere

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-132
Author(s):  
Liberty Kohn
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Knowledge Construction ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Communication Style ◽  
Deep Foundations ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
White Working Class

The 2016 election cycle and ensuing presidency of Donald Trump has been attributed in large part to his support among working-class whites (Gest 2016, p. 193; Tyson and Maniam 2016). Their reasons for support, however, are open to interpretation. This article will suggest that elements of Donald Trump’s public communication style and ethos align with elements of working-class culture, language use, and knowledge construction. Trump’s anti-institutional, anti-government rhetoric reifies these components of working-class culture because of institutions’ and government’s deep foundations in middle-class culture, language use, and knowledge construction—and the working-class’s, especially the white working-class’s, alienation from these institutions, with the result being anger or apathy (Lareau 2003; Jensen 2012; Gest 2016). These values are often embedded in a master narrative that defines white working-class life as one of victimization (Hochschild 2016; Gest 2016; Cramer 2016). The article next suggests that Trump’s oft-used rhetorical framework of not just immigrants as threat, but of immigrants as protected and valued by institutions that overlook white workingclass concerns (Gest 2016), opens up one possible persuasive framework to legitimate Trump’s xenophobia and racism through white working-class attitudes.

The Unspeakable Events at the Glasgow Music Halls, 1875

1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (43) ◽  
pp. 225-229
Author(s):  
Dagmar Kift
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Edition ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
National Perspective

The history of the music hall has for the most part been written as the history of the London halls. In Dagmar Kift's book, The Victorian Music Hall and Working-Class Culture (the German edition of which was reviewed in NTQ 35, and which is due to appear in English from Cambridge University Press), she attempts to redress the balance by setting music-hall history within a national perspective. Arguing that between the 1840s and the 1890s the halls catered to a predominantly working-class and lower middle-class audience of both sexes and all ages, she views them as instrumental in giving these classes a strong and self-confident identity. The sustaining by the halls of such a distinct class-awareness was one of their greatest strengths – but was also at the root of many of the controversies which surrounded them. The music-hall image of the working class – with its sexual and alcohol-oriented hedonism, its ridicule of marriage, and its acceptance of women and young people as partners in work as in leisure – was in marked contrast to most so-called Victorian values. The following case study from Glasgow documents the shift of music-hall opposition in the 1870s away from teetotallers of all classes attacking alcohol consumption towards middle-class social reformers objecting to the entertainment itself. Dagmar Kift, who earlier published an essay on the composition of music-hall audiences in Music Hall: the Business of Pleasure (Open University Press), is curator of the Westphalian Industrial Museum in Dortmund.

The Politics of Middle-Class Success in an Inner-City Public School

1982 ◽  
Vol 164 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Timothy Sieber
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Inner City ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Patterns Of Failure ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
Political Struggles

Recent ethnography of minority and working-class schooling has shown how wider structural factors like class stratification, poverty, and racism influence observable patterns of failure and under achievement in the classroom. In contrast, ethnography in middle-class schools and classrooms has not seriously probed similar structural bases of middle-class children's success, instead attributing this success to a presumed equivalence between the “middle-class culture” of the children's homes and the culture of the school and its staff. This study traces the history and effects of middle-class involvement in the public elementary school of a gentrifying inner-city neighborhood in New York City. Segregated into their special classrooms with distinctive curriculum and organization, the school's middle-class children were more successful than their poor and working-class peers. Their success was not the result, in Bourdieu's terms, of the “cultural capital” afforded by their middle-class upbringing. The school staff, in fact, disapproved of many elements of the children's class culture. Rather, the children's successful standing within the school had been the object, and achievement, of their parents' long-standing political struggles against the school's staff and other parents. This case illustrates that school success is as much an active social construction—both inside and outside the school—as school failure has been shown to be.

scholarly journals Class, Culture, and Downward Mobility

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessi Streib
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Interview Data ◽  
National Study ◽  
Downward Mobility ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Class Reproduction

The study of class and culture is predominately the study of class reproduction, not also downward mobility. This article maintains that sociologists do not see the cultural mechanisms associated with downward mobility because we share three collective blinders. First, we under-emphasize the ways that middle-class cultural practices are mismatched with the practices that institutions reward. Second, we over-emphasize the utility of middle-class cultural practices for their class reproduction. We do this as we focus on youths’ cultural practices within institutions, ignoring that not all youth enter institutions associated with class reproduction. Third, we assume that the dominant cultural practices of each class keeps youth in their original social class. In doing so, we do not consider that middle-class actors avoid downward mobility by adopting the dominant practices of the working-class. Using interview data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, this article shows how removing these blinders can help us understand how culture relates to downward mobility. It does so by revisiting Lareau’s theory of how entitlement and constraint relate to class reproduction.

Paradise Lost? Patterns and Precarity in Working-Class Academic Narratives

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-44
Author(s):  
Deborah M. Warnock
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Student Debt ◽  
Survivor Guilt ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Impostor Syndrome

Through an analysis of eight collections of autoethnographic essays written by working-class academics and published over the span of thirty-two years, I identify stable themes and emergent patterns in lived experiences. Some broad and stable themes include a sense of alienation, lack of cultural capital, encountering stereotypes and microaggressions, experiencing survivor guilt and the impostor syndrome, and struggling to pass in a middle-class culture that values ego and networking. Two new and troubling patterns are crippling amounts of student debt and the increased exploitation of adjunct labor. I emphasize the importance of considering social class background as a form of diversity in academia and urge continued research on the experiences of working-class academics.

‘Our Platform is Broad Enough and our Movement Big Enough’ – The War and Recruits to Labour

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Swift
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Skilled Workers ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Real ◽  
Liberal Tradition ◽  
Post War

This chapter deals with the question of how the war impacted on Labour’s electoral fortunes after 1918. It considers the post-war influx of Liberals who felt that Labour was now the real home of the radical Liberal tradition, the experiences of soldiers and ex-servicemen specifically, and the extent to which the Left made ‘cultural’ appeals to voters: as Englishmen and women, as Britons, as patriots, as Anglicans, as Catholics, and as individual people. This chapter argues that support for the war was critical to the successes of Labour in the inter-war period. Not only did it prevent a Parliamentary annihilation in 1918, it secured patriotic credentials to counter-balance the influx of middle-class radicals; prevented a break with the trade unions; and facilitated Labour’s appeals to a working-class culture based on family, neighbourhood, pubs and patriotism. It will be argued here that this cultural appeal to the wider working class allowed Labour to win support from beyond both the heavily unionised skilled workers and the Nonconformist tradition which had hitherto provided most of its support, and that the experience of the war – and labour patriotism during that conflict – was essential to this cultural appeal.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

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