{"content":[{"text":"THE THE NEA NEA HIGHER HIGHER EDUCATION EDUCATION JOURNAL JOURNAL 71 71 \n Toward a Theory \n Of Working Class \n L i t e r a t u r e \n By Renny Christopher and Carolyn Whitson","bbox":{"left":0.261827,"top":0.031245,"width":0.6524350000000001,"height":0.252274}},{"text":"The dominant tradition of 20th \n Century American literature is one \n of realism and naturalism. It has \n produced a literature that has told \n us, in concrete terms, the cost of \n American civilization. \n — James T. Farrell \n I \n n these pages, we wish to pro- \n pose that the intellectual life of \n our nation would be richer if \n those of us from the working class \n brought with us into the academy \n our own literature and culture. \n Just as women’s studies, \n African American studies, Native \n American studies, and other \n recently developed programs have \n enriched the academy, so too is \n there a place for the serious study \n of working-class literature and cul- \n ture. \n We mean by working class the \n b l u e - c o l l a r, wage-earning sector of \n our society, where people tend not \n to have college educations or finan- \n cial assets beyond the market value \n of their labor. We see this economic","bbox":{"left":0.130118,"top":0.335209,"width":0.374241,"height":0.476395}},{"text":"sector as possessing a culture that \n differs in values and aesthetic from \n the nation’s dominant middle-class \n culture. \n For our purposes here, we \n define the literature of the working \n class as works written by working- \n class people about their class \n experience.1 \n There is no shortage of this sort \n of working-class writing, but there \n is no agreed-upon definition of \n working-class literature. In fact, \n since the 1930s, there has been lit- \n tle discussion of working-class lit- \n erature, and the definitions of the \n ’30s are inadequate to the circum- \n stances of the present. \n We need to move beyond, as \n Constance Coiner notes, those \n 1930s “Marxist assumptions about \n working-class literature that place \n a resistance culture in binary oppo- \n sition to bourgeois culture”:","bbox":{"left":0.544333,"top":0.333714,"width":0.36944599999999994,"height":0.409989}},{"text":"Working-class literature is, at \n best, a subspecies of bourg e o i s \n literature, just as any culture of","bbox":{"left":0.582234,"top":0.758096,"width":0.2936749999999999,"height":0.053508}},{"text":"Renny Christopher teaches American literature at California State University, Stanis- \n laus. She is the author of The Viet Nam War/The American War (University of Massachu- \n setts), and Viet Nam and California (poetry; Burning Cities Press). She is writing a mem- \n oir. Carolyn Whitson, also a poet, teaches medieval literature, women's literature and \n film, and American working-class literature at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul. \n The authors are co-writing a study of 20th century American working class literature.","bbox":{"left":0.133137,"top":0.843978,"width":0.780424,"height":0.08566700000000005}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}