scholarly journals The Condition of the Working Class: Representation and Praxis

WorkingUSA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-503
Author(s):  
Mike Wayne ◽  
Deirdre O'Neill
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Class Representation

“Tangled Passions”: Realism and Lyricism in the Plays of Peter Gill

Modern Drama ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 442-457
Author(s):  
William McEvoy
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Time Perspective ◽  
Social Deprivation ◽  
Young Male ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
History Of ◽  
Class Representation ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

This article argues that the work of Welsh theatre director and playwright Peter Gill occupies a unique place in post-1960s’ British playwriting. It explores Gill’s plays as – using theatre critic Susannah Clapp’s phrase – the “missing link” between kitchen-sink realism and more self-consciously poetic forms of theatre text. Gill’s plays make an important contribution to the history of working-class representation in UK theatre for three main reasons: first, the centrality he gives to Wales, Welsh working-class characters, and the city of Cardiff; second, his emphasis on the experience of women, especially mothers; and third, his focus on young male characters expressing and exploring the complexities of same-sex desire. The plays make advances in terms of realist dialogue and structure while also experimenting with layout, repetition, fragmentation, poetic description, and monologue narration. Gill’s work realistically documents the impact of poverty, cramped housing conditions, and social deprivation on his characters as part of a political project to show the lives of Welsh working-class people on stage. While doing so, Gill innovates in his handling of time, perspective, viewpoint, and genre. His plays occupy a distinctive place in the history of British, working-class, gay theatre, helping us to rethink what each of these three key terms means.

The Knights and Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Parfitt
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Local Level ◽  
National Level ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
British Labour ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Class Representation

This chapter explores the political ventures of British and Irish Knights at a municipal and national level, and compares them with the great working-class political mobilisation that American Knights led in in the mid-1880s. It categorises the various political stances held by leading figures in the British and Irish assemblies and then charts their attempts to elect councillors and MPs, build political movements at a local level, and join political organisations set up by trade unionists to support independent labour representation. In England, and in Scotland, Knights were part of the different political traditions and ideas - working-class Liberalism, socialism, and the desire for working-class representation – that coalesced in time in the form of the British Labour Party.

scholarly journals Resiting French Resistance

1999 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 271-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. R. Kedward
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Social History ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Group Actions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Railway Workers ◽  
Class Representation ◽  
French Nation ◽  
French Resistance

Exceptions, minorities, non-conformities, individual refusals and small group actions, these are words with which historians of the French Resistance learn to live. The words allow social detail to flourish, but they stand in the way of general social conclusions and question the kind of class representation which seems so convincing in René Clément's film of the resistance of railway workers, La Bataille du rail (1946), but which cannot be sustained for the working class as a whole. Is there a social history of the Resistance? Are all generalities suspect? The French nation as a category is far too large, so is the working class, and equally so the bourgeoisie and the peasantry: it has often been argued that social and political categorisation of the Resistance is nothing but a captivating mirage, tantalising every new interpreter who sets out to give much needed structure to empirical research.

scholarly journals Russian Working Class Youth Media Representation: The Discourse Analysis Experience

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatiana Gavrilyuk ◽  
Vyacheslav Malenkov
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
Russian Media ◽  
Class Representation ◽  
Class Youth

The objective of this research is to investigate the recent discursive turn in working class representation in the Russian media. The means of creation and translation of normative class patterns, stereotypes and political agency within Russian media have been studied using the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis. The empirical basis of the research is the textual transcripts of the key communicative events marking the working class as a political subject. The qualitative analysis allowed us to distinguish the rhetorical techniques and semiotic resources of working-class representation in the political field: thematic repertoire, format, practices which interlocutors use in addressing each other, language style and naming. It has been established that the forgotten concept of a “working class” was actualized and entrenched in the official political discourse in 2011. It was borrowed from left-wing political forces and re-assembled as one of the means of ruling class positioning in the 2011–2012 electoral cycle. Industrial working class representatives were included in public discourse as a part of the political staging, the consequences of which led to minor social changes. The populist discourse of working-class politicians as a “voice of common people” was constructed to oppose it to the protesting “creative class” threatening the main political force. The short-term political goal of power agents was to represent working-class people and youth especially as a political subject loyal to the existing regime, embedded into the current political system and ready to defend it if necessary. The nostalgic rhetorical technics were primarily used to re-launch “working class project”. Keywords: working class, working-class youth, discourse analysis, populism, political discourse

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