US! A Course On Working Class Fictions.

• Time/day: TBA
• Venue: TBA
• Facilitator: James Redmond
• Contact: james@anarchistu.org

Introduction

Class is a constant process of formation, it is how they eye us up and how we eye them up in an endless unfolding of power balances, institutional forms, desires, fears and fantasies. Hence this course runs from Charterism and socialism to the mass worker, then beyond to class displacement and what may be germs of wholly new class experiences in the slums of the south and the knowledge industries of the North.

Unfortunately a resurgent capitalism in the seventies and eighties destroyed class based movements, forcing its theory to retreat into the universities, where the flying Molotov and pickets of the street turned into the floating signifiers of academia, leaving our images of class paralyzed amidst the excitement of post-modernity. Any vision of class dominated by miners and factory workers, forgets what is truly revolutionary about the working class - how we push against our very definition as working class and try to outflank it.

The course has a few learning ambitions, firstly it hopes to develop a grab bag of concepts useful to a class conscious literary criticism today, without wearing ourselves out with the nauseating intricacies of critical theory. Most importantly through fiction it aims for a de-familiarization of our own lived experience - so we as readers look again at the unspoken in our own everyday, where we may see the cracks in capital and the swarms trying to rush it.

At the moment secondary readings are pretty minimal, though more will arise once people start to join the course. Don't worry about covering all of the material, the course is meant to revolve around themes--so if you can't read a fiction, then try read a secondary piece so you can still contribute.

Please email antrophe at gmail.com to be added to the course email list and begin to receive background reading updates.

Preliminary General Readings

• Haywood, Ian. Working-Class Fiction from Charterism to Trainspotting (Nortecote 1997)

• Munt, Sally R. "Introduction" Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change pp 1-19 (Cassell 2000)

• Spence, Luke. "British Working Class Fiction: The Sense of Loss and The Potential For Transformation" Socialist Register (1998)

• Barbrook, Richard. " The Class Of The New"

The Toronto Public Library website has a research? section that opens readers to a wide universe of searchable readings across academic journals, cultural weeklies and newspapers.

1. Charterist Fiction and the Making of A Working Class

Charterism - that movement towards the great democratic ideal of a working class franchise is often cited as the moment where the British working class emerged "made" from a space between the democratic ideals of the French revolution and the social havoc of industrialization. As a result Chartist literature stands as an important source of historical and cultural information about working-class life in nineteenth-century Britain. It's a dual moment marking the possibility of an aesthetic self-representation alongside a growing working class political voice. The literature of these organic intellectuals was almost a "pulp" phenomenon that appeared mainly in the popular underground "unstamped press" of the movement. These portraits of the new industrial life led to the development of a sympathetic middle class " social problem" novel that over-shadowed Charterist fiction, relegating it to the position of quirky cultural artifact, prodded at by social historians and ignored by the rest of us.

Fictions

• Allen Clarke Daughter of the Factory

• Elizabeth Gaskell Mary Barton

• Thomas Cooper Merrie England

Background reading

• Moss, Bernie. The Hidden Marxism of The Making of The English Working Class

• Demetra Kotouza Lies and Mendicity

• Fredrich Engels The Condition of the Working Class In England (a variety of extracts are available online)

• Lansbury, Coral. "Mary Barton: The Condition of the Working Class in Manchester" Elizabeth Gaskell: The Novel of Social Crisis, pp. 22-50 (Barnes and Noble 1975)

• Ganz, Margaret. "The Social C onscience" Elizabeth Gaskell: The Artist in Conflict, pp. 49-131 (Twayne 1969)

2. The Socialist Didactic In Literature

This class will look at the development of a literature committed to the political causes of the working class. Often produced by authors deeply rooted in struggle, these works ultimately de-romanticise the idea of a historical class agency--we are left with complex portraits instead of a homogenizing rhetoric. The authors to be discussed populate their works with auto-didactic anti-heroes who distract themselves from the sewers with bar room lectures on philosophy and socialism, much to the disdain of those around them. This is a literature that largely celebrates working class communities and their resilience amidst the tragi-comedy of circumstance and narratives that grudgingly nod to the epic events we now associate with the classic workers' movement.

Fictions

• Sean O'Casey The Plough and The Stars

• Lewis Jones We Live and Cwmardy the introduction is online. courtesy of the library of Wales

• Robert Tressell The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

Background reading

• Random selections from Leon Trostsky on Art and Literature

• Jonathan Rose The Classics in the Slu ms City Journal, Autumn 2004

• James Connolly Revolutionary Song

3. Class Cliches and Breaking the Kitchen Sink

Despite the post-war Keynesian compact between labour and capital, and the promises of the welfare state, 1950's Britain produced a literature seething with frustration and anger among the young. A new social mobility created antagonisms between new and old experiences of class, creating tensions within families and between communities. Prior to this class we will have looked at the formation of a class identit

y - here we will see why some speak of this era of affluence as a period where the working class was "unmade" giving way to a new shattering individuality. The novels of this period sat alongside an emerging movement in theatre that fought a stifling cultural atmosphere, where regional accents were ridiculed or absent on stages dominated by "big house" farces and family comedies that re-enforced the snobberies and sexual hypocrisies of the day. Despite the attempt of authors to move beyond the stock caricature of the worker, ironically, it is from their "kitchen sink" drama that most of our clich?s around class originate, something now most evidenced in the stylistic flourishes of Ken Loach's movies and British working class soaps.

Fictions

• John Braine Room at the Top

• John Osbourne Look Back in Anger

• Alan Sillitoe Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

• Neil Dunn Up The Junction

Background Readings

• Soundtracks:

• Billy Bragg A New England

4. Coronation St and the Working Class Soap.

Taking a break from texts, after a short framing introduction this class will primarily be spent watching about 60 minutes of televised material collectively then having an open discussion. After looking at the conventions of kitchen sink fiction, this installment of our course seeks to look at the popularity of working class soap opera and comedies in Britain and how they differ drastically from counterparts in North America. Just as they have reified particular forms of traditional working class stereotypes to a point of fantasy, they have equally played a role in ushering in visions of a more diverse society both racially and sexually. Despite their immense popularity, these cultural forms and the daily chatter surrounding them, are scorned at by critics as mindless. Wary of those that validate their own pet cultural forms as distinct from those enjoyed by the rabble, we beg the question, do the millions of viewers that watch these episodic dramas bend them to a critical interpretation

of their own lives or just passively consume them?

Silver Screen Fictions

• Cornation Street

• Shameless

• Eastenders

• The Royle Family

Background Reading

• Shameless Series 4 Reviewed by Tom Jennings

• Introduction Distinction : A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979)

5. Class Acts Laying Bear the Machine: The Methodology of Working Class Theatre

This class takes a look at non-passive theatrical forms through looking at two playwrights that re-visited theatre as a truly popular form. Both were deeply rooted in the politics of the social movements whirling around them, inspired by revolutionary methods of organizing they used the stage to articulates arguments from below on a number of levels. Both of the plays chosen are relatively short and attempt to move beyond any analysis that posits class and gender analysis as hostile to each other.

Plays

• Carl Churchill Top Girls

• Dario Fo Can't Pay, Won't Pay.

Background Readings

• The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community

• Italy�s Red Decade: Social Struggles and Political Power 1968 � 1980

6. Sent Out of Place: Irvine Welsh, Class Displacement and the

Post-Industrial

People are non too hesitant to dismiss Irvine Welsh as a junk pornographer. Such rushes to criticism do little to enunciate how he articulates the shattering of traditional class experiences against the backdrop of Thatcherism in Britain, with a ruling class that bludgeoned the working class at every opportunity, destroying its manufacturing base and warning "there is no alternative." Reading these novels we get a feeling that after the miners strike we are dealing with a working class that has retreate

d, wary of their own supposed representatives and excluded from the new material mainstream. Through Welsh we see themes repeated from the kitchen sink era, catching a glimpse of communities displaced in a rush to a post-industrial society, left to struggle against their very designation as working class and refusing the demands of the work day

Fictions

• Irvine Welsh "Smart Cunt--A Novella" The Acid House

Background:

• Simon Reynolds: Energy Flash Chapter on Happy Hardcore

Soundtracks:

• Billy Bragg Waiting for the Great Leap Forward

• Gang of Four To Hell With Poverty

• Gang of Four Capital It Fails Us Now

• Simon Reynold's This Is Post Punk Mix

• http://www.nialler9.com/blog/2007/06/10/when-time-becomes-a-loop/][Variety Box Courtesy of Nialler9]]

7. The Future Present: Favella Fiction and the Global Working Class

Contrary to the optimism of modernity slum living has become the dominant mode of survival for large segments of the world's population, leaving us somewhat fascinated with favelas and other slum formations in the West. Movies like Favela Rising and City of God burst through the box office and in clubs we get down to the slum styling of Baile Funk as hip hop becomes a tension between a ghetto to ghetto musical hackery and pop product. Is this a perverse distant gazing similar to how the Victorian middle classes snuck mediated glances at their own contemporary slums and is the language of a 19^th Century philanthropy kept alive through the World Bank and IMF? This brief detour looks at the challenges this phenomenon presents to our ideas of class, a topic already wetting the appetite of theorists like Mike Davis and Zizek.

Fictions

• Chris Abani Graceland

• Meja Mwangi Going Down River Road

• Paulo Lins City of God

Background

• Mike Davis Planet of the Slums in its original http://newleftreview.org/A2496][original New Left Review form]]

• Iain Boal 21st Century Noir from a Mute Special on Planet of the Slums

• The Cite de Soleil documentary.

Soundtracks

• DJ Rideon's Ghetto808 mix

• Some Kuduro from Buraka Som Sistema

• DJ Rupture Gold Teeth Thief

• Diplo http://www.cokemachineglow.com/audio/favela_on_blast.mp3][Favella On Blast mix]] and see the documentary if interested ...

• Magabo's World Up! Mix

8. From Despair To Where? The End of A Traditional Class Narrative

Douglas Coupland has become renowned for coining phrases that capture aspects of the zeitgeist, just think of how Microserf, JPod, Generation X and McJob? resonate with your images of the modern workforce. Despite this attribution of a general character of labour, these are works lacking a collective class experience or interpretation - made up of individual stories, streams of fleeting job descriptions and few ambitions beyond the individual. In these works class seems trapped in stasis, unable to move beyond its own recognition of position with capital holding all the cards. Other authors like William Gibson feel technology has moved forward to such a degree that he can relinquish his future settings for a present obsession with Web 2.0 and how we interact with technologies. This class begs the simple question what sort of class forms are emerging in our new reality and what does fiction have to say about?

Fictions

• Chetan Bhaga One Night @ the Call Center

• William Gibson Pattern Recognition

• Douglas Coupland Microserfs and Generation X

Background Reading

• Wright, Steve. Reality check: Are We Living In An Immaterial World? (Mute)

• Lazzarato, Maurizio. Immaterial Labour

Optional On Screen Nights

Bludgeon us to death with nonsense about the book being better than the film, but really some of us just want a quicker dose of gratification in between work and sleep. If the mood is there, then we can massively increase our shared cultural reference points through screenings of films, movies and TV programmes illustrating key themes.

This Sporting Life | The Blinder | Vera Drake | Shameless | Kes | Kathy Come Home | Blue Collar | Brassed Off | La Haine | This Is England | Quadrophenia | Trainspotting | Twin Town | Last Exit to Brooklyn | Room At The Top | Saturday Night and Sunday Morning | Quadraphonia | The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner | A Taste of Honey | Business as Usual | Dockers | City of God | El Norte | F.I.S.T. | The Full Monty | Metropolis | The Molly Maguires | Modern Times | Office Space | On the Waterfront | Il Postino | Reds | Riff Raff | The Young Cassady | Strike! | Total Recall | Wall Street | Duck, You Sucker AKA A Fistful of Dynamite ... please send in your recommendations.