Working-class against their will: “Recognized” refugees in France and Bulgaria in the early twenty-first century

In American society, rural spaces – particularly those of the working class – are seen as stagnant holdovers from a temporal past that “modern” society has evolved beyond. As a result, working-class rurality and those living within these places are viewed as static, ignorant, insular and so on: whatever places do not conform to the appearance of “modern” progress and development simply must be regressed, on both socioeconomic and cultural levels. While scholars in some disciplines are attempting to redress this misconception, other disciplines (like literary studies) largely align with the mainstream perspective that rurality represents a regressed past to our evolved present. However, despite the critical lack of attention to rurality as a viable space in the present, we can see in various fictional works that working-class rural spaces can effectively show us the interrelationship of rural spaces with “modern” society and culture in the present, the continuing relevance and deep history alike of said spaces, and the potential of these fictional working-class rural places to confront America's norms of progress and development within and without their fictional borders. Richard Russo's fiction illustrates the potential to bring out this critical working-class rural voice. Russo's fictional treatments afford the reader an opportunity to witness the ever-changing complexity (not the temporal and cultural regression) of working-class rurality. In turn, Russo's fictional working-class rural spaces offer a counterperspective to the mainstream (defined here as middle-class and (sub)urban) notions of progress that otherwise dismiss these perspectives. In his book Empire Falls, Russo uses nostalgia to assert this counterperspective. This nostalgia not only reaffirms the postwar and early twenty-first-century working-class rural identity of Empire Falls, but it also offers a critique of dominant conceptions of progress and development that continue into our present.

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Continuing Visions

10.1093/oso/9780198813279.003.0011 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Linda Freedman

Keyword(s):

Social Activism ◽

William Blake ◽

First Century ◽

Ridley Scott ◽

American Novel ◽

Early Twenty ◽

Protest Group ◽

Late Twentieth ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

Dead Man

The questions that drove Blake’s American reception, from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century through to the explosion of Blakeanism in the mid-twentieth century, did not disappear. Visions of America continued to be part of Blake’s late twentieth- and early twenty-first century American legacy. This chapter begins with the 1982 film Blade Runner, which was directed by the British Ridley Scott but had an American-authored screenplay and was based on a 1968 American novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It moves to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film, Dead Man and Paul Chan’s twenty-first century social activism as part of a protest group called The Friends of William Blake, exploring common themes of democracy, freedom, limit, nationhood, and poetic shape.

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