scholarly journals From Politics to Pope: An Account of the Group Aesthetic

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 32
Author(s):  
Rob Breton
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Laboring Class ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Work Done

This paper discusses the study of Chartist and working-class literatures, noting that the pronounced development of aesthetic criticism in these areas uncomfortably corresponds with the rejection of “aesthetics” in other fields. Chartist, working-class, and laboring-class scholars have broken free from monolithically sociological or political readings that only a generation ago too often dismissed artistic endeavors as, at best, merely a re-accenting of the mainstream. Current studies focus on the aesthetic innovations that emerged out of working-class entanglements with mainstream counterparts. The paper argues that the rejection of “aesthetics” generally fails to recognize marginalized and group aesthetics (including the critical work done on marginalized and group aesthetics) and specifically what it meant for a political cohort—the Chartists are my example—to think aesthetically.

Working-Class Writing and the Use Value of the Literary

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 932-938 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonali Perera
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Use Value ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Greenwich Meridian ◽  
Country Culture ◽  
The Aesthetic

Formal preoccupations, which is to say specifically literary concerns, appear in small literatures only in a second phase, when an initial stock of literary resources has been accumulated and the first international artists find themselves in a position to challenge the aesthetic assumptions associated with realism and to exploit the revolutionary advances achieved at the Greenwich meridian.—Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters“In our country culture has become so complex, this complexity is reflected in our literature. It takes a certain level of education to understand our novelists. The ordinary man cannot understand them …” … And she reeled off a list of authors, smiling smugly. It never occurred to her that these authors had ceased to be of any value whatsoever to their society—or was it really true that an extreme height of culture and the incomprehensible went hand in hand?—Bessie Head, A Question of Power (first ellipsis in orig.)ON WHAT BASIS ARE SELECT TRADITIONS OF LITERARY INTERNATIONALISM RECOGNIZED AS WORLD LITERATURE AND OTHERS DEEMED MERELY historical, relics of nostalgic Marxism or of resolved debates on aesthetics and politics? According to recent influential formulations, world literature is writing that in original or translated form circulates outside the author's country of origin. But what of traditions of literary internationalism, like those of working-class writing, that reverse and displace practical, utilitarian propositions to ask, instead, in more abstract terms, what is the use value of the literary? Bessie Head's A Question of Power poses a challenge to practical definitions. What of literary texts that have global currency but aren't of “any value whatsoever to their society”?

scholarly journals Claude McKay, The Workers' Dreadnought, and collaborative poetics

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48
Author(s):  
Stephanie J Brown
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Political Judgment ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
The Arts ◽  
East End ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Holistic Representation

This paper considers the journalism and poetry Claude McKay produced for Sylvia Pankhurst's communist weekly Workers' Dreadnought in 1920 as a collaboratively produced body of work. This allowed Pankhurst to have a Black communist commentator on hand to cover workers' issues, and McKay used Pankhurst's periodical as a platform from which to dramatise the aesthetic and political potential inherent in collaboration between working-class activists, journalists, and artists for the paper's readers. In the Dreadnought's pages, McKay's poems very publicly weighed the value of collaborative labour and considered the arts' place in the class struggle. He simultaneously produced journalism that advocated collaboration among races to resist the racial antagonism that sparked violence in the most impoverished East End communities in the summers of 1919 and 1920. Ultimately, McKay's work for the Dreadnought produced a holistic representation of working-class intellectual life founded on the production of beauty and the exercise of aesthetic as well as political judgment, one that depicts these activities as inevitably commingled and collaboratively produced.

The Work of Verse

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-62
Author(s):  
Kirstie Blair
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Occasional Verse ◽  
Opening Section ◽  
The Way

The first chapter provides an introduction to, and overview of, ‘occasional’ verse and performed verse, and considers the functions of newspaper poetry columns. Its broad remit underpins the detailed studies in the later chapters, and sets up the arguments about the work done by Scottish working-class poetry that re-occur in these. It contains an opening section discussing why working-class poetry came to seem so prevalent in Scotland, and how it became considered vital to Scottish cultural identity. This is followed by subsections on the role of occasional verse in commemorating and celebrating particular events or social occasions, the rise of newspaper poetry columns, and the way in which these columns fostered poetic communities.

scholarly journals Countervailing aesthetics? Depictions of British Muslims and the multicultural working class in post-7/7 art

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-254
Author(s):  
Madeline Clements
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
First Century ◽  
Community Members ◽  
The Social ◽  
Islamic Terrorism ◽  
Breeding Grounds ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
British Culture

This article considers the significance of artist Philip Gurrey’s 2008 series of portraits of members of multicultural working-class communities in Beeston, Leeds, in the social, political, and cultural context of the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings. Reflecting on the impetus for making these works, Gurrey has observed that “the predominant rhetoric [in 2007] was almost as if this place was generating extremism” (2014a: n.p.). In his opinion, “the artist’s prerogative is to look at the aesthetic generated; the feel and mood of the place as portrayed by the media was completely wrong” (2014b). This essay focuses on The Beeston Series (2008–2009) of paintings, which Gurrey composed by merging and splicing together the features and skin-tones of the suburb’s community members, and subsequently exhibited to local audiences at the BasementArtsProject in south Leeds, a space removed from the metropolitan centres that appeared either to dismiss or to demonize them. Drawing on Jill Bennett’s explorations of art as the “critical, self-conscious manipulation of media” (2012: 6), this article goes on to explore how such mundane and unsensational, though striking, portraits presented an aesthetic that ran counter to contemporaneous representations of such communities as the breeding grounds of Islamic terrorism. It argues that through such critical, aesthetic approaches, artists in twenty-first-century Britain contest still-dominant discourses around the failure of multiculturalist policies and supposed alienness to indigenous British culture of Muslim identities, and fears about the harbouring of an “enemy within”. In doing so, it draws comparisons between Gurrey’s regionally-specific paintings and other more metropolitan attempts to depict the aesthetic realities of 7/7, the perpetrators of such attacks, and the multicultural, working-class identities scrutinized in their wake. Works discussed in relation to The Beeston Series include Mark Sinckler’s controversial drawing Age of Shiva (2008), and Faiza Butt’s Is This the Man (2010) portrait series.

scholarly journals The politics of hyperbole on Geordie Shore: Class, gender, youth and excess

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Wood
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Class Youth

This article discusses MTV’s Geordie Shore against the backcloth of current social conditions for working-class youth. It suggests that the aesthetic, physical and discursive features of excess represent hyperbole, produced from within an affective situation of precariousness and routed through the labour relations of media visibility. Hyper-glamour, hyper-sex and hyper-emotion are responses to the ideologies of the future-projected, self-governing neoliberal subject and to the contemporary gendered contradictions of sexually proclivity and monogamous heteronormativity. By ‘flaunting’ the realities of self-work and making the labour of themselves more/most visible, the participants of Geordie Shore are claiming an animated type of ill/legitimate subjectivity.

Poetic Vanguardism and Political Violence in Capel Lofft’s “Chartist Epic”

2021 ◽  
pp. 76-112
Author(s):  
Mark A. Allison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Event ◽  
The People ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Conceptual Resources

In 1839, an economically battered Britain teetered on the threshold of revolution. The neo-Spencean poet Capel Lofft aspired to use his anonymously circulated epic, Ernest; or, Political Regeneration, to send it over the brink. Ernest describes, in sanguinary detail, the growth and eventual triumph of an agrarian-communist insurrection. A charismatic poet leads the revolt, using fiery oratory to inspire his co-conspirators. Because Ernest was clearly intended to galvanize militant elements within the Chartist movement into action—and because its author was alarmingly eloquent—hysteria greeted the epic’s appearance. This chapter’s reading of Ernest traces how Lofft employs vanguardism, the belief that artists can lead the masses in a progressive direction, to allay his own doubts about the viability of popular self-governance. More broadly, it utilizes Ernest, a hybrid of contemporaneous radical social and political thought, as a staging ground to investigate the uneasy comingling of Chartism and Owenite socialism, the two great working-class movements of the first half of the nineteenth century. Lofft’s epic stages several questions with exemplary clarity: is revolution a political event, or the anti-political mechanism by which “politics” is definitively superseded? Are the people the heroes of the emancipatory narrative? Or does the revolutionary leader, rendered sublime by the fervency of his commitment, inevitably eclipse them? Can poetry, a literary mode increasingly defined by its detachment from practical concerns, marshal the rhetorical and conceptual resources of the aesthetic to foster national regeneration?

Romantic Wales and the Imperial Picturesque

2020 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-192
Author(s):  
Timothy Heimlich
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Local Difference ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Aesthetic

Abstract This essay argues that the aesthetic category named the picturesque was first systematized in a Welsh colonial context and that picturesque looking always reflects, to some degree, its initially imperialist function. While the picturesque rapidly acceded to a preeminent place in British travel and landscape writing, its rise was contested by Welsh and working-class writers like the antiquarian poet Richard Llwyd (1752–1835). By conspicuously failing to impose picturesque features on a carefully historicized landscape, Llwyd’s poem Beaumaris Bay (1800) lays bare the picturesque’s antihistorical drive to eradicate local difference. Renewed critical attention to early attempts to establish an antipicturesque aesthetic may uncover important precursors to present-day postcolonial and transnational theory, precursors that can enrich the ongoing global turn in literary history.

More than words: Chris Searle’s approach to critical literacy as cultural action

Race & Class ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-78
Author(s):  
Colin Lankshear ◽  
Michele Knobel
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Critical Literacy ◽  
Literacy Education ◽  
Language And Literacy ◽  
Life Trajectories ◽  
School Teaching ◽  
The World ◽  
School Classroom ◽  
Teaching Life ◽  
Work Done

This article discusses what seem to us to be some of the key features of Chris Searle’s approach to language and literacy education within school classroom settings in England, as portrayed in his own writings and reflected in work done by his students and published in numerous compilations from Stepney Words (1971) to School of the World (1994). We understand his work as a sustained engagement in critical literacy, underpinned by an unswerving belief that being a literacy educator serving working-class communities is inherently a political, ethical and situated — material and grounded — undertaking. Throughout his school teaching life, Chris Searle took it as axiomatic that working-class children should learn to read, write, spell, punctuate and develop the word as a tool to be used in struggles — their own and those of people like them, wherever they may live — for improvement and liberation. Literacy education for working-class children must proceed from, maintain continuity with and always be accountable to the material life trajectories and prospects of these children. It can only do this by maintaining direct contact with their material lives and their situated being within their material worlds.

scholarly journals Umění a ideologie – k estetickým implikacím a výstavním možnostem uměleckých částí Sbírky Muzea dělnického hnutí

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-17
Author(s):  
Michaela Brejcha
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Similar Nature ◽  
Special Position ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
The Aesthetic

In 2018 the National Museum gained support within the program NAKI of the Ministry of Culture for the project entitled The Museum of Working Class Movement in 21 Century, which is aimed at the presentation of The Collection of the Museum of Working Class Movement and other collections of similar nature. We may expect that thanks to its nature burdened by their communist past, the presentation outputs of the project will give rise to controversy. Thus the researchers of the project are faced with the question of how to present the Collection in adequate manner. Among the collection objects will be presented also artistic materials of the Collection which, thanks to their aesthetic nature, occupy special position, since the works of art have not only ideological function as other objects of the Collection, but have also the aesthetic function and related aesthetic value. This essay is directed at the analysis of aesthetic value of ideologically burdened works of art and also at their specific exhibition possibilities. We shall deal with the notion of pure art, which, on the level of the subconscious, keeps on influencing strongly our evaluation of the works of art till these days, and further with the concept of art as the path of revolutionary transformation of reality, and finally with functional aesthetic basis.

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