Teaching class: A pedagogy and politics for working-class writing

Campbell is a visiting assistant professor at the College of the Holy Cross. She has published on Chaucer and is currently working on a book on black and white women in 20th century American literature.

Culture has replaced brutality as a means of maintaining the status quo. (Tuer 196)

While class becomes an increasingly important category of analysis within academic discourse, it is simultaneously, paradoxically, being drummed out of our national rhetoric. In this nation whose central myth was and remains the rise of the individual ever-upwards through social and financial strata that, cloud-like, apparently fade away as they are passed through, "class" remains the unspoken category. Politicians may talk about the middle-class, or working people, but seldom are the words "working class" spoken in a national context (Keach 1994). The point can not be made often enough that the New Right's assault on Affirmative Action programs as well as on the reproductive choice of women (to name just two), while perhaps most obvious as assaults based on visible differences of race and sex, are more subtly policies about class, since the effects of these policies will be experienced most harshly by those who are economically vulnerable. Insofar as mainstream politics keep the body politic divided into ethnic groups, each of which feels its own economic status threatened by other ethnic groups (rather than threatened by the power of capitalism and conservative politics), the formulation of a class-based consciousness is severely limited. For these reasons, the concept of class needs to be vigorously taken up in today's classrooms, not as a substitute for analyses of race and gender, but as a constant extension of them. As Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore write in Revising Class, "We are compelled. . . to entertain a range of interactive relationsclass and culture, class and race, class and gender without making causality a onedirectional phenomenon, and without attributing to the first term a determinative weight"(3). Performing readings of texts to which class is central (although not necessarily determinative) can reveal to students some of the ways that the cultural practices they learn in college (and long before) help maintain the status quo of a society increasingly polarized by privilege and want.

My goal in this essay is to work toward the development of a contingent working-class aesthetic that can help students learn to think critically about America's class system and, in particular, their own position in relation to it. Focusing on cultural manifestations of class status rather than on purely economic ones, I discuss how class affects reading practices.1 I want to suggest ways of reading through which middle-class students can, perhaps for the first time consciously, engage with the presence of class conflict while working-class students may come to recognize some of their own lives reflected and affirmed in a literary text. This task, however, is fraught with difficulty because of the peculiar function of higher education in relation to class. As the briefest reading of almost any working-class autobiography or fiction reveals, it is education (and not money) that marks the (usually troubled) movement from working-class childhood to a middle-class adulthood. Institutions of higher education are a primary means of socializing students into a middle-class conformity since, at its most conservative, corporate level, education works hand in hand with the State to produce leaders differentiated from workers.2 Thus, to develop a Working-Class Studies institutionally, or a working-class aesthetic (as this essay attempts to do) from within an institution whose goal has historically been to produce a national elite, is fraught with contradictions that seem to me at this moment irresolvable. I proceed with this essay in the hopes that it can help generate discussion about these difficult issues, knowing that even the attempt to read workingclass literature "academically" may be interpreted as cooptation.

An early part of the academy's intervention in matters of class struggle has been the recuperation of fiction and autobiography by working-class people. Perhaps the best known of these are writers active during the 1930s: this decade certainly occupies a privileged spot in the fledgling field of working-class studies.3 Leftist feminists have led the way in the recovery and affirmation of writers such as Tillie Olsen, Meridel LeSueur, and Agnes Smedley, all of whom write powerfully and provacatively about growing up poor and female in the first third of the twentieth century.4 All of these three writers were rediscovered and revalued during the 1970s by white feminist scholars searching for a fuller vision of women's history and literary expression; all three have since come to be identified as the core of working-class women writers (especially Olsen). At the same time (the 1970s), however, other women not identified primarily as "working class" by the scholars interested in the legacy of the 1930s were also writing about the struggles of growing up working class or underclass in America. Not always of a leftist politics, these women writers nonetheless have contributed significantly to the articulation of class concerns in America. When their work is pulled from other traditions of writing-African-American, Latina, immigrant, lesbian-we can begin to see a body of working-class writing that is much more broadly inclusive than that whose central focus is the work of white leftist writers from the 1930s. By expanding our definition of working-class literature, we can expose students to a range of writers-and a range of political positions-to encourage them to think about the ways in which class divisions are created and sustained through literary practices common in today's colleges, universities, and publishing practices.