Class: A Guide Through the American Status SystemInClassPaul Fussell explodes the sacred American myth of social equality with eagle-eyed irreverence and iconoclastic wit. This bestselling, superbly researched, exquisitely observed guide to the signs, symbols, and customs of the American class system is always outrageously on the mark as Fussell shows us how our status is revealed by everything we do, say, and own. He describes the houses, objects, artifacts, speech, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from the top to the bottom and everybody -- you'll surely recognize yourself -- in between.Classis guaranteed to amuse and infuriate, whether your class is so high it's out of sight (literally) or you are, alas, a sinking victim of prole drift. |
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Excellent book on American class system. Alas, now somewhat out of date on markers you can be on the lookout for, such as type of furnishings around the home that clue you in on the background and class of the person. Persian rugs are less abundant in the upper classes these days. But the ones that do still have them have precisely the same ones. If you're not an idjut you can certainly extrapolate to current day stuff that wasn't around back when the book was written.Clothing styles changed big time, but update it to modern dress codes based on snaps of random target audience people in the magazines aimed at each market and you'll twig. I discovered lots of hidden truths about my own background and by explaining the layers within each class I discovered how my parents, each from a different class, managed to have a happy healthy relationship that lasted til death did they part.
Review: Class: A Guide Through the American Status System
User Review - Ryan - GoodreadsDo not read this book if you are not a snob. You'll be greatly offended. Read full review
Contents
The Life of the Mind | 128 |
vn Speak That I May See Thee | 151 |
vin Climbing and Sinking and Prole Drift | 170 |
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Common terms and phrases
advertising American Anglophilic anxiety archaic archaism audience bottom bowling British called catalogs class signals class system classier clothes collar color Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney cultural designed dinner display dressed drink eating especially euphemism Fiske front glass high prole high-prole higher identify imagine indicate infer institutions jacket Jilly Cooper L. L. Bean largely learning living room look low proles lower mail-order catalogs means middle class Molloy necktie never nice Official Preppy Handbook one's Paul Fussell person popular principle prole cap prole drift reading restaurants shirt social class sometimes sort status sticker Studs Terkel style subtract suggests suit syllables taste tend there's things tion top classes top-out-of-sight University upper upper-class upper-middle upper-middle-class Vance Packard Veblen visible vulgar watch wear wine word worn Wright Mills yacht York
Popular passages
Page 28 - ... for his style highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow. Not that the three classes at the top don't have money. The point is that money alone doesn't define them, for the way they have their money is largely what matters. That is, as a class indicator the amount of money is less significant than the source. The main thing distinguishing the top three classes from each other is the amount of money inherited in relation to the amount currently earned. The top-out-of-sight class (Rockefellers, Pews, DuPonts,...
Page 19 - Democracy demands that all of its citizens begin the race even. Egalitarianism insists that they all finish even.
Page 18 - The desire of the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger ; and the neglect and contempt of the world as severe a pain as the gout or stone.
Page 169 - The type of man who is recruited for college teaching and shaped for this end by graduate school training is very likely to have a strong plebeian strain. His culture is typically narrow, his imagination often limited. Men can achieve position in this field although they are recruited from the lower-middle class, a milieu not remarkable for grace of mind, flexibility or breadth of culture, or scope of imagination.
Page 42 - The prole suffers physically, but he's a free man when he isn't working. But in every one of those little stucco boxes there's some poor bastard who's never free except when he's fast asleep and dreaming that he's got the boss down the bottom of a well and is bunging lumps of coal at him.
Page 14 - class' is fraught with unpleasing associations, so that to linger upon it is apt to be interpreted as the symptom of a perverted mind and a jaundiced spirit.
Page 174 - The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear, of course, that this "everybody
Page 178 - You become an X person, or, to put it more bluntly, you earn X-personhood by a strenuous effort of discovery in which curiosity and originality are indispensable.
Page 82 - It would be extremely difficult to find a modern civilized residence or public building which can claim anything better than relative inoffensiveness in the eyes of any one who will dissociate the elements of beauty from those of honorific waste. The endless variety of fronts presented by the better class of tenements and apartment houses in our cities is an endless variety of architectural distress and of suggestions of expensive discomfort.
Bibliographic information
| Title | Class: A Guide Through the American Status System A Touchstone book |
| Author | Paul Fussell |
| Edition | illustrated, reprint, reissue |
| Publisher | Simon and Schuster, 1992 |
| ISBN | 0671792253, 9780671792251 |
| Length | 202 pages |
| Subjects | › › Social Science / Anthropology / General Social Science / Demography Social Science / General Social Science / Poverty & Homelessness Social Science / Social Classes & Economic Disparity |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |