The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Anyway, I just thought that the article was an interesting link between reading, community and contemporary culture, and wanted to share it with you all, In particular, the comment about ‘sex and violence novels’ reminded me of our lecture and seminar discussions yesterday. To what extent is it true that writers just write what the publishers want to publish? For me, this doesn’t feel like the way that Robinson has approached Lila, and gathering from the seminar discussions this is partly why we all valued her integrity and writing style.

Find sources: "The Uses of Literacy"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( April 2021) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) There are, maybe, lists on which this short and singular book should be at home. For Observer readers, I believe that Syntactic Structures would be a hideous imposition. Instead, from the same year, 1957, I am choosing Richard Hoggart’s beautifully written and profoundly influential, classic of British postwar cultural analysis, The Uses of Literacy. Hoggart spices his text with phonetic lists of northern phrases, all phonetically mis-spelt and wthout an h in sight (as Orwell succintly referenced in the Road to Wigan Pier). This is a book I've meant to read for years. It's a bit of an icon, because when it was published it was something genuinely new; an attempt to pin down the culture of the northern working classes and assess how general social changes have influenced it. As such, it was a pioneer of that much-derided and misunderstood area of academia, Media Studies.He was witnessing a change of these relationships as people moved out of the communities of the past and into new council housing in England. He was concerned that this change diminished the ‘we’re all in this together’ feel of the communities and therefore acted to undermine working class feeling and sensibility. He is also clearly worried that the rising materialism of the working classes (perhaps consumerism is a better word here) was also destroying working class community and creating instead a form of isolated individualism.

It is often said that there are no working classes in England now, that a ‘bloodless revolution’ has taken place, which has so reduced social differences that already most of us inhabit an almost flat plain, the plain of the lower-middle to middle classes.” Three to Compare This book starts by painting a picture of working class life, considering everything from living in a two-up-two-down, what you might eat, the types of jobs you might do, your relationship to religion, to nationalism, to other social classes and even to sport. Naturally, a lot of this has changed in the years since, but perhaps not as significantly as we might like to think. One of the things he makes clear is that social class is relational, not least in the sense of it being about ‘us’ and our relation to ‘them’. The introduction says that he first wanted to call this book The Abuses of Literacy, but changed his mind. I think that is a useful thing to know. This is an early work of cultural criticism and his discussion of the newspapers, magazines, novels and music that working class people are likely to read and listen to is utterly fascinating. A profound lesson from much of this is that it would be wrong to assume that the working class assimilate this material whole, rather than first ‘making it their own’. Nonetheless, a lot of his discussion here shows how these materials either completely reinforce ‘normal’ working class life, or, like the hard-boiled novels discussed, are so beyond belief that they can only really be used as a form of escapism. His book publisher was concerned that they might get sued if he used direct quotes from some of these novels – and so he made up books. One of those was a book called ‘Death Cab for Cutie’ – which later became a pop band, stealing his title. All very amusing. Williams, R. (1957). ‘Working-Class Culture’, The Uses of Literacy Symposium, Universities and Left Review, 2, Summer.

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The shortness of the attention span fed and sated by media also has its strong, familiar contemporary parallels: there’s a section on ‘fragmentation’ in reading that reads exactly like an explainer of Buzzfeed and passive social media-led ‘content grazing’. The welcome assertion too that readers of newspapers aren’t a tabula rasa and don’t ingest every position of the editor is also worth celebrating (against the patronising fallacy that ‘Murdoch’ tells the ‘sheeple’ what to think, which persists today on much of the witless Left). I bought this book at the time, on his recommendation, but never actually read it. All the same, it has turned up repeatedly over the years, mentioned in other books I did read. And now that I have read it, I didn’t expect it to be nearly as interesting or as affecting as it has turned out to be. How did our culture became so polarised – and what can Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, written 60 years ago, teach us about how we live today?” Hoggart, R. (1970). ‘Schools of English and Contemporary Society’, Speaking To Each Other, Vol. II. London: Chatto and Windus. The general effect of all the new tendencies is a growing estrangement from the real lives of the majority of ordinary people. Even songs that used to unify with a sense of shared experience are now targeted at the individual in a superficial way.

It seemed like it might be interesting in light of our module and seminar discussions, so I read on… He concludes: “One of the most striking and ominous features of our present cultural situation is the division between the technical language of the experts and the extraordinarily low level of the organs of mass communication.”

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The Uses of Literacy is a book written by Richard Hoggart and published in 1957, examining the influence of mass media in the United Kingdom. [1] The book has been described as a key influence in the history of English and media studies and in the founding of cultural studies. [2] [3] Massification of culture [ edit ] When a society becomes more affluent, does it lose other values? Are the skills that education and literacy gave millions wasted on consuming pop culture? Do the media coerce us into a world of the superficial and the material - or can they be a force for good? Some working class cultural things he describes sound familiar (e.g. naughty seaside postcards), but others have passed into history: “The rituals of the Buffs and Odd Fellows. The new clothes bought for children on Whit Sunday”. There were also things I recognised in myself; the “working class speeches and manners in conversation are more abrupt, less provided with emollient phrases than other groups....I find that even now I have to modify a habit of carrying on a discussion on an 'unlubricated' way”. Its primary importance, I’m to understand, is as a landmark of cultural studies – in which respect it is a curious blend of current observation and self-ethnography (making it already a bit of a curiosity and as much autobiography as treatise). Meanwhile, several surprises for me along the way (which might be debated), including his claim that working class people in this era weren’t patriotic (really?) and that they were only really monarchists if it involved glamour (that surprised me).