Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Tom Woodin
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Working Class ◽  
School Children ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Unemployed People ◽  
National Network ◽  
The World ◽  
Publishing Groups ◽  
Retired Workers

During the 1970s, working-class writers entered the cultural landscape in ever greater numbers. ‘Ordinary’ people formed writing and publishing workshops in which they explored ideas, histories and feelings. A great variety of people started writing, including school children, housewives, black and minority groups, unemployed people, retired workers as well as those still in work. Writers of all ages were examining personal experience with fresh eyes and renegotiating their place in the world. Over the coming decades, thousands of publications would be produced, with an estimated readership in the millions. Autobiography, poetry, short stories and drama were consumed avidly by those within the writer’s immediate vicinity as well as by more general readerships. In 1976, the working-class writing and publishing groups, which were proliferating across the country, established a national network, the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP or ‘the Fed’), that would later add the strapline ‘to make writing and publishing accessible to all’....

The Russian People as They Are. Turgenev’s View

2018 ◽  
pp. 71-82
Author(s):  
Sergey Nickolsky
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Man ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Nature And Society ◽  
Philosophical Nature

The question of the Russian man – his past, present and future – is the central one in the philosophy of history. Unfortunately, at present this area of philosophy is not suffciently developed in Russia. Partly the reason for this situation is the lack of understanding by researchers of the role played by Russian classical literature and its philosophizing writers in historiosophy. The Hunting Sketches, a collection of short stories by I.S. Turgenev, is a work still undervalued, not fully considered not only in details but also in general meanings. And this is understandable because it is the frst systematic encyclopedia of Russian worldview, which is not envisaged by the literary genre. To a certain extent, Turgenev’s line is continued by I. Goncharov (the theme of the mind and heart), L. Tolstoy (the theme of the living and the dead, nature and society, the people and the lords), F. Dostoevsky (natural and rational rights), A. Chekhov (worthy and vulgar life). This article examines the philosophical nature of The Hunting Sketches, its structure and content. According to author’s opinion, stories can be divided into ten groups according to their dominant meanings. Thus, in The Hunting Sketches the main Russian types are depicted: “natural man,” rational, submissive, cunning, honest, sensitive, passionate, poetic, homeless, suffering, calmly accepting death, imbued with the immensity of the world. In the image and the comments of the wandering protagonist, Ivan Turgenev reveals his own philosophical credo, which he defnes as a moderate liberalism – freedom of thought and action, without prejudice to others.

Beyond the Fife and Drum: Northern Protestant Working Class Cultures

Public Voices ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Paul Burgess
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Working Class ◽  
World Order ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
Dimensional Image ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Meaning Systems ◽  
The World ◽  
Symbolic Systems

The author contends that throughout the duration of the present conflict in NorthernIreland, the world has been repeatedly given a one-dimensional image of this culture depicting it as mainly a product of ethnicity and also a reflection of class sentiment and lived experience.As drummer and songwriter of Ruefrex, a musical band internationally renowned for its songs about the Troubles conflict in Northern Ireland, Burgess discusses the need to express Protestant cultural traditions and identity through words and music. Citing Weber’s argument that individuals need to understand the world and their environment and that this understanding is influenced by perceptions of world order and attitudes and interpretations of symbolic systems or structures, the author argues that losing the importance of symbolic structures in relation to actual events will result in failure to understand why communities embrace meaning systems that are centrally informed by symbol and ritual. In his mind, rather than seeking to promote an understanding of Protestant or Catholic reality, it is important to speculate how the practice of difference might be used in developing any kind of reality of co-operation and co-ordination

Judy Jaffe-Schagen, Having and Belonging: Homes and Museums in Israel. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016. x + 221 pp.

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Multicultural Society ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Ethiopian Jews ◽  
State Of Israel

This chapter reviews the book Having and Belonging: Homes and Museums in Israel (2016), by Judy Jaffe-Schagen. In Having and Belonging, Jaffe-Schagen explores the connection between identity, material culture, and location. Focusing on eight cases involving Chabad, religious Zionists, Moroccan Jews, Iraqi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Russian Jews, Christian Arabs, and Muslim Arabs, the book shows how various minority groups in Israel are represented through objects and material culture in homes and museums. According to Jaffe-Schagen, in the politicized cultural landscape of borderless Israel, location not only affects the interplay between objects and people but can also provide important insights about citizenship. Her main argument is that the nation-state of Israel is not a multicultural society because it has failed to serve as a cultural “melting pot” for the various immigration groups.

Beckett’s Expelled

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Stonebridge
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Dark Background ◽  
The World

Samuel Beckett is known for his unique abstraction of human suffering. This chapter shows how his wartime experiences transformed his writing, producing one of the first really critical literary depictions of the new subject of human rights and humanitarianism. Beckett’s engagement with what he described in 1946 as ‘the time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins’ began with his own experience of displacement and with his work with the Irish Red Cross in Saint-Lô. The characters who wander through the three short stories that he first wrote in French, ‘La Fin’, ‘L’Explusé’, and ‘Le Calmant’, collectively known as the Nouvelles, are both subject to a regime of humanitarian indifference (‘They clothed me and gave me money’ read the first lines of ‘La Fin’) and restless agents, stumbling in a stripped down French, groping for a new narrative. These are the new clowns of the dark background of difference, ironists of their own suffering, chroniclers of the gap that had opened up between the placeless people and the rest of the world.

Jude the Obscure

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Hardy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
The World ◽  
The University ◽  
Jude The Obscure ◽  
Do So

Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?' Jude Fawley, poor and working-class, longs to study at the University of Christminster, but he is rebuffed, and trapped in a loveless marriage. He falls in love with his unconventional cousin Sue Bridehead, and their refusal to marry when free to do so confirms their rejection of and by the world around them. The shocking fate that overtakes them is an indictment of a rigid and uncaring society. Hardy's last and most controversial novel, Jude the Obscure caused outrage when it was published in 1895. This is the first truly critical edition, taking account of the changes that Hardy made over twenty-five years. It includes a new chronology and bibliography and substantially revised notes.

scholarly journals A World Through Glass: A Narrative Around the Family Experiences During the Confinement of COVID-19

2021 ◽  
pp. 0192513X2110249
Author(s):  
Gustavo González-Calvo ◽  
Marta Arias-Carballal
Keyword(s):  
School Children ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Family Experiences ◽  
Emotional Burden ◽  
Outdoor Activities ◽  
The Family ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrative Methodology

COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in March 2020, and the world has witnessed significant changes since then. Spain has been forced to go into extreme lockdown, cancelling all school classes and outdoor activities for children. Our study explores how parents of a group of school children aged 7 to 8 years have experienced confinement due to the COVID-19 health crisis. Following a narrative methodology, the results have been organized around a story that takes as a reference the period of confinement for a mother and worker in times of confinement. The conclusions of our study suggest that participants have experienced significant changes in their routines, having faced numerous personal and professional dilemmas in a climate of great emotional burden. This study is the first of its kind in investigating how the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the ways that children and their families live and its possible implications for their futures.

Firoz Uncle

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-115
Author(s):  
Sreejith Murali
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Life ◽  
After School ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Educational Failure ◽  
The World ◽  
Mumbai City

This article focuses on the educational efforts of Syed Firoz Ashraf in the East Jogeshwari area of Mumbai and places his work in the context of the increasing communalisation of social life and education in a poor working class suburb in Mumbai city. Muslim community has been ghettoised in the metropolis to specific areas especially since the riots of 1992-93, increasing their vulnerability. For more than twenty years ‘Uncle’, as he is affectionately called, has been running after-school classes for children from the working class neighbourhoods of Jogeshwari and Juhu Lane. He has worked within the system to enhance opportunities for higher education for children, and to end the humiliation and indignity associated with educational failure. As Uncle says, there is hope as more and more children break out of the confines of their locality and step out into the world through higher education.

Takin' Care of Business

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Case
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Juvenile Delinquents ◽  
The World ◽  
Rock N Roll

We usually associate the sounds of classic rock ‘n’ roll with youthful rebellion, by juvenile delinquents, student demonstrators, idealistic hippies, or irreverent punks. But an important strain of rock from the late 1960s onward spoke to and for a very different audience: the regular working-class fans who didn’t want to change the world as much as they wanted to protect their place in it. From Creedence Clearwater Revival to Bruce Springsteen, from Lynyrd Skynyrd to AC/DC, and from Judas Priest to Ted Nugent, the music provided the anthems of an increasingly distinct—and increasingly vulnerable—demographic, which has since become a key influence on political culture around the world.

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