Did your university offer any courses specifically on working class literature? Mine offered a handful of courses in readings on Jewish lit, Chicano lit, Postcolonial Diaspora, etc., but nothing specifically and exclusively proletarian.
Was this the case for you? If so, why? Do you think there's a need for it?
If it wasn't the case for you, and did have the opportunity to take such course, can you describe the curriculum covered?
if I met you irl I would probably hate you
Thanks, your contribution is appreciation.
>Was this the case for you?
It was predominantly what my uni offered.
>If so, why?
Why what?
>Do you think there's a need for it?
Not really. Even the kids that were into these classes always ended up admitting that very little of the novels we read for class were any good.
>If it wasn't the case for you, and did have the opportunity to take such course, can you describe the curriculum covered?
If you’re asking me to write out a syllabus for a class I don’t have the time. Just imagine reading essays written by bitter hacks trying to “dismantle” “great works” and forgettable novels. That’s about it. Throwaway classes.
> Why what?
In the event that someone's university did not offer those courses, I'm asking why they think that was the case. I went to a fairly liberal state school and I feel like such a course would be cast as "boo hoo poor white people," and that wouldn't sell among the predominantly white middle class privileged feminists filling the ranks of the humanities department.
Anyway, could you describe your thoughts on English studies? Why the field is useful, and what you think English students should gain?
There has never been any good working class lit. Prove me wrong.
Usually because once you can make a living writing, you’re no longer working class
The only guys I can think of who kept up their working class jobs were Bukowski and that longshoreman philosopher
This is because the petit bourgeois neoliberal intelligentsia truly cares very little about the plight of the working man, aside from grandstanding displays of sweeping sappyness meant to evoke a false sense of empathy in the eyes of onlookers.
Sure, on the surface, but that's an overly simplistic view. Wealth doesn't define class. Neither does lifestyle, really.
> Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are inexpensive indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education.
You don't jump from working class to middle/upper class just simply because you're making a livable wage in a professional job. Besides, you're dismissing the throngs of working class writers who were submitting their work in magazines, reviews, and newspapers, not making a penny but publishing eminently proletarian literature.
In this case, there are plenty of "working class" writers who were educated among the elites of society, went to university alongside the elites of society, then went into distinguished careers again among that class. A notable example would be Orwell (a thoroughly forgettable stylist but memorable for his political involvement), although you can find tons of similar authors today cashing in on their parent's poverty in exchange for cultural capital while producing truckloads of self important drivel about their hard lives of struggle within the Ivory Towers.
>"boo hoo poor white people," and that wouldn't sell among the predominantly white middle class privileged feminists filling the ranks of the humanities department.
I also went to a very liberal state uni. I couldn’t imagine a class that took a sympathetic view toward working class white males.
>Anyway, could you describe your thoughts on English studies?
Frankly it was mostly a waste of time but it got me a bachelors which translates to higher paying jobs so whatever.
>Why the field is useful, and what you think English students should gain?
To be honest I don’t feel like I gained much. I would’ve liked to have studied the art of literature or something to that effect but the people who teach these subjects have a curious hatred of literature. At least at my school.
Orwell was middle class
Middle class roots, middle class upbringing
DH Lawrence had working class roots but he had a scholarship to a middle class secondary school.
Did he transition to middle class when he became a school teacher?
It all depends how you define class
DH Lawrence was a highly redpilled literal fascist. maybe the reason working class literature isn't allowed in universities is because the working class tends to be much more redpilled and sympathetic to fascist ideas than the sanctimonious and multicolored clique of bourgeoisie leftist managers and bureaucrats that make a carreer out of academia.
Tell that to the hoards of working class feminist woman of colour graduating from the upper echelons of Harvard and Yale. Are they less authentically working class for their appearance or thoughts? Many would say they are more so.
I think Zizek said that a characteristic of class struggle is that class cannot be simply defined, it's a constant negotiation among different classes of society over cultural or social ownership over certain aspects.
Building on this, we must then be inherently cautious of any attempt by a university (or politically conscious bourgeoisie such as OP) to seize on and canonicalize "working class literature", since in doing so the educated upper-middle class is able to position itself as gatekeepers of properly 'authentic' working class literature and thought, while also ascribing their own politically charged (and, as all things, self serving) intention, meaning, and meta-narrative to otherwise unrelated pieces of work.
If you want to authentically experience 'working class' thought, spend a year working construction. Or as is often said in literary analysis, "form is content". Attempts towards categorization by faggy college kids should rightfully be considered cultural annexation and recognized as inherently paradoxical.
wah wah i need the clueless bourgeois to teach me about the working class :(
Because they lack the social connections to get published. In the UK you pretty much have to go to Oxford if you want a book deal.
>university
>teaching praxis
HAHAHAHA
LET'S ALL READ BENJAMIN AGAIN.... I'D LIKE TO PUT IT IN DIALOG WITH SALLY ROSENBERG'S THESIS ABOUT A CANGUILHEMIAN HAUNTOLOGY OF THE IMAGINARY OF CAPITAL, AS PROVED BY ME SHOVING STICKS IN MY ASS FOR MY SENIOR PROJECT
Universities don't offer proletarian literature courses because they're not in deep communist russia
Intellectualism is a means to create the hierarchy necessary to function within egalitarian movements. Intellectuals don’t care about what the proletariat has to say.
a political movement of the working class isn't concerned about working class literature or 'theory' it is concerned with seizing power total political power by any means necessary, instead of bureaucratic it is vitalistic, and hence it is fascist by definition.
>a political movement of the working class isn't concerned about working class literature or 'theory' it is concerned with seizing power total political power by any means necessary, instead of bureaucratic it is vitalistic, and hence it is fascist by definition.
See, here you've reduced the working class to a noun, and attached a whole bunch of unnecessary and politically charged adjectives. Effectively making "working class" a signifier for some sort of implied fascist mass action you wish to see come into being. It's a neat rhetorical trick, perhaps even why the ancients considered speech and writing to contain magical potential, but it doesn't translate into reality any more than a description of a bird could grow wings and fly away.
Instead of jerking off about politics, take up a trade and respectable blue collar work. That is the authentic working class, which can be lived but never fully described.
As in about the working class or written by the working class? The former there is plenty i'm not really sure about the latter though.
boy that picture really sums up a perfect reality
a vein-throbbing loser yelling at others to listen to him, but no one does. Too bad we don't live in that one.
>you will never live among a community of star gazing anarchists while some fag in overalls screams about organization to the general apathy of everyone
tragic
>go work in a factory or stay out here and look at cool planets
uh gee I wonder. why can't commies even make good propaganda
Chicano lit is shit
t. Mexican
Is Chicano literature somehow different from central and South American literature? Because I like authors from those areas.
Yes, it's something else. Chicano lit is about Chicanos... aka Americans who speak three words of Spanish and gave Mexican ancestors. It's terrible. Mexican lit is miles better. Also Mexico is in North America btw.
have* not gave.
The closest thing to good Chicano lit are /int/ shitposts.
First, anyone graduating from Harvard is no longer working class. It doesn't matter if they spend the rest of their life as a dishwasher.
Second, your refusal to define working class is just as stifling as the hopeful fascist.
Something about this guy makes me suspicious. I'm pretty it of touch with fashion but I suspect that outfit/picture cost thousands.
If you take a class on American minimalism a lot of the big names write mainly about working class people--Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, etc.
It is obvious OP follows a class struggle analysis and is using working class as shorthand for proletarian. Fuck off Weber.
The bongs had a bunch of working class writers in the 60’s
Silitoe
The Kes guy
Shelagh Delaney
Edward Bond
I think Pinter was working class. A tailor’s son if I remember right.
And you had guys like John Osborne who were middle class and wrote about the working class
>implying that traditional class struggle can exists in a society where intellectual labor provides more power and elite status than the ownership of capital.
Why waste your time on that?
>Second, your refusal to define working class is just as stifling as the hopeful fascist.
But that's the point obtusely being made. Any clear definition would be political, because 'working class' is already a very loaded term.
If you take a collection of 'working class' literature and attempt to create a canon, that's even more explicitly political. Most likely, it would end up being a genre focused list (Soviet Realism or Naturalism most likely, masquerading as an expression of class consciousness. What's unlikely is that the class will study the diary of their local postman or the love poetry of Joe down at the Steel-Mill).
As I said before, 'form is the content'. Any academic study of "The Working Class" would, by virtue of being academic study, be inherently removed from any understanding of working class life or values. If you want to study the working class, get a factory job, because the moment you sit down behind a desk you've missed the point.
>Something about this guy makes me suspicious
Maybe the fact he's wearing clean overalls in a city? It should be legal to assault people like that.
>Chicano lit
Wtf kind of McUniversities have this shit?
Yeah I never got this marxist mentality for the first world, what is there for workers to own? Shits just not here antmore
Because plenty of Gramscis mind workers have unionists and won. Marx uses the proletarian teacher as an example of the centrality of the labour power sale relationship to class dynamics. Crawl back into your hole of Distinction.
More subtle. By the time you sit down behind a desk to produce ideology, you will not produce the praxis of sitting down behind a desk.
Academia as a form is incapable of praxis. Academics may or may not be proletarian depending on their relationship with social production. But the product of paid academic work is not proletarian praxis, but rather capital. Much like the widget makers product is capital, even as his pub poetry is proletarian.
Get good. You need more Gramsci and Lukas. Then you need to do Operaismo.
isn't the "working class", according to Marx, alienated and that what kept them under "capitalist oppression" ?
Aside for this major fall in logic, i SUPPOSE i can help you out.
I'm Brazilian, live in the state of Ceará, very poor state, our people here have a history of long suffering, We have various literature works called "cordel" wich is a form of poem ? and have these sort of bard type guys, the most famous of them called "Patativa do Assaré", look him up, he didn't write very well, didn't finished school, but has some very famous poems that talk about our people suffering.
Don't know if it's what you want, but... it is what came to mind.
Good point, and noted.
Would the solution be to situate your working class study instead around literature's representations of the working class? Similar to how Black academics often would prefer to shy away from teaching Black authors in favor of Black representation.
So teaching bourgeois ideology because the teaching of bourgeois ideology is inescapable?
I’d rather run a poetry page in the union journal.
There's not a solution. Not everything needs to be studied, especially if the thing itself defies study.
If you genuinely are interested in the "working class" join a fucking factory and go to union meetings. It's a respectable lifestyle, but not half as romantic as you're probably imagining.
If you're interested in academics, there are literally hundreds of thousands of wonderful novels and historical documents that need translated. Learn a language and contribute something to society. Trying to project psuedo-marxist meta-narratives on abstract qualities isn't good for anything but naval-gazing.
If you're just looking to wear overalls and go to trendy communist meetings and smash people's windows and sleep around with girls with pink hair who call themselves anarchists and don't do anything about it, go ahead and do that, but don't try and justify it with some moral prerogative or academic witchery like a disingenuous cunt.
The analysis of the academy as a factory is more fun, but as I’d rather have money, a life, and the ability to publish research freely I work in a factory instead of doing praxic colearning analysis of the academy.
Academia might be a nice fantasy, but if you want to do real research get a factory job.
Are you implying I'm not working class already?
>that longshoreman philosopher
Hoffer. Just bought one of his books, The True Believer. Haven't read it yet.
fpbp
Of course it can be studied. If I can get an anthropological study of some tapir fucker in the jungles of borneo, we can get some kind of reasonable idea of "working class".
Yeah. I understand the anxiety surrounding an academic co-opting of working class thought, but the moment someone cites Marxian praxis you know they're speaking in theoretical absolutes.
I'm not sure I understand the fear. What does it matter it'd some academics understand the working class? Are they going to start organizing them for a communist takeover? Exploiting them for marketing purposes? The former seems quite unlikely and the latter is already happening.
One main reason is because once the dominant class starts arbitrating working class literature, society—including working class society—begins to define working class thought. That is dangerous if you happen to be a member of the working class.
The reason this is different from, say, academic LGBTQ+ studies, is because LGBTQ+ identity is compatible with bourgeoisie identity. The working class can never integrate with academia. Even if that cultural arbitration is conducted by a genuinely proletarian academic (i.e., a formerly-working-class university professor is defining a working class canon), that co-opting of working class thought persists.
If anyone from the previous discussion would like to correct me, please do.
"Working class" people are too busy and usually too low-I.Q. to write much literature. Believe it or not most people tend to wind up doing as lucrative a job as they are capable of doing. That being said there was that custodian who died and left behind that massive manuscript about some child slave rebellion, the title escapes me.
>I also went to a very liberal state uni. I couldn’t imagine a class that took a sympathetic view toward working class white males.
That's strange though. Considering they are the hardest hit by poverty in the USA. I'm not American, but whites being the majority and being there long before all the descendent of recent wealthy and educated immigrants, means they fill the ranks of the lowest of society more than anyone else because they don't have privileged backgrounds.
Probably all the California ones
But as long as the elites can keep the working class black man and Mexican feeling superior to the working class white man, they won’t rise up.
> Was this the case for you?
yes
>If so, why?
i dont know
> Do you think there's a need for it?
no
> can you describe the curriculum covered?
i was told everyone is gay and into interracial sex. i forgot the book it was about everyone fucking each other, native son, communist propaganda, i also read books about tennements working families, etc...all this by some rich fat tenured asshole making $100,000 a year. paid for by the state. the classes were required.
Why do they care more about brown people and trannies though?
I don't think this would really be the case. Here's what would happen: Say some academic does an amazingly good job discovering working class literature.
Next the popular press publishes a bunch of articles about "ten books that mean you're working class". The aspirational class freaks out and never again reads those books. While the working class never even hears about it because they don't read and are busy working. "working class" becomes this hipster affectation (as already happens), while working class people move on to whatever is easier/cheaper because they are too busy trying to hold their life together to even notice.
Where's the harm?
Gorki? Ostrovsky?
> Next the popular press publishes a bunch of articles about "ten books that mean you're working class".
You're being dumb. The cultural permeation would be insidious, beginning with (you guessed it) the thousands of 18-22 year old college kids who have now come to define the "working class" against this canonical literary background. It's harmful should they ever come into contact with a working class person who happens to fall outside of that necessarily subjective model.
How is it harmful? They currently look down on the lower class, since why did they go to college and that's just the nature of things. In the new situation they wouldn't recognize someone as working class because they'd fail to conform. And? Is there some kind of benefit to being seen as ignorant and poor? The government is still going to distribute services based on income, not which books you've read.
>because they don't have privileged backgrounds.
Well, according to my professors at uni a homeless schizophrenic white man is still more privileged than an upper middle class black man. But anyone who disagrees with that is a nazi trump supporter so whatever. I just got my degree and got out.
I will castrate you in self defense if I ever see you on the street
Moby fucking Dick
Identity politics are just a power grab/consolidation by the rising petite bourgeois blacks. Which is fine, just how the game goes. The confusing part is why any upper middle whites go along with it. The conditioning designed by one faction of the upper class is very strong with them.
>longshoreman philosopher
Who?
Any good?
Middle class
How are you valuing literature? How are you defining it? The American proletariat have been writing for decades, user.
Eric Hoffer
Ultimately a liberal. So no.
My professors were hostile to the working class, the irony being most were in debt to their masters and PhD programs with no way out. Universities aren’t for whites or men anymore which could be read quite easily as they aren’t for intellectual pursuits.