apropos my last entry

[brisance]

Working-class culture, in the stage through which it has been passing, is primarily social (in that it has created institutions) rather than individual (in particular intellectual or imaginative work).

-Raymond Williams, from Culture and Society 1780-1950 in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. 229.

Glee as "working-class culture." Hmm...

Comments

The Social Mode of Glee

[ext_99744]

Is GLEE really an artifact of working-class culture? I thought it was another product of our dying middle-class ideology.

Re: The Social Mode of Glee

[brisance]

Probably so.

I was just thinking about the emphasis on the collective and the institution rather than the individual. But the argument of the article, I think, is that a novel with a working class protagonist is still a bourgeois product, and that working-class art would be more like a few hours at a baseball game or people hanging out in a pub or something. Maybe.