Working through Change (i): Oral Testimony and the Language of Class

Abstract

The previous chapter addressed the status, contexts and concerns of working-class writing — examining the role of autobiography and notions of the literary, as well as the importance of institutional frames and formations in the making of a working-class text. It was suggested there that these conditions were inevitably operating within hegemonic frameworks: that of a literary/cultural establishment and its modes of inclusion and exclusion which help form, as well as reflect, the wider values and beliefs of society more broadly conceived. Dominant literary institutions and their representatives shape ideas of the literary, and this is inevitably reinforced through related institutional sites or fields within higher education and the metropolitan broadsheet press and other media concerned with “culture”. Though in recent times it appears that some relaxation of the notion of “what is literature” may have emerged, the exchange mapped out in the previous chapter between Jenkins and Kelman suggests a tension at best, a “business as usual” situation at worst.