The Uses of LiteracyThis pioneering work examines changes in the life and values of the English working class in response to mass media. First published in 1957, it mapped out a new methodology in cultural studies based around interdisciplinarity and a concern with how texts-in this case, mass publications-are stitched into the patterns of lived experience. Mixing personal memoir with social history and cultural critique, "The Uses of Literacy "anticipates recent interest in modes of cultural analysis that refuse to hide the author behind the mask of objective social scientific technique. In its method and in its rich accumulation of the detail of working-class life, this volume remains useful and absorbing. Hoggart's analysis achieves much of its power through a careful delineation of the complexities of working-class attitudes and its sensitivity to the physical and environmental facts of working-class life. The people he portrays are neither the sentimentalized victims of a culture of deference nor neo-fascist hooligans. Hoggart sees beyond habits to what habits stand for and sees through statements to what the statements really mean. He thus detects the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances. Through close observation and an emotional empathy deriving, in part, from his own working-class background, Hoggart defines a fairly homogeneous and representative group of working-class people. Against this background may be seen how the various appeals of mass publications and other artifacts of popular culture connect with traditional and commonly accepted attitudes, how they are altering those attitudes, and how they are meeting resistance. Hoggart argues that the appeals made by mass publicists-more insistent, effective, and pervasive than in the past-are moving toward the creation of an undifferentiated mass culture and that the remnants of an authentic urban culture are being destroyed. In his introduction to this new edition, Andrew Goodwin, professor of broadcast communications arts at San Francisco State University, defines Hoggart's place among contending schools of English cultural criticism and points out the prescience of his analysis for developments in England over the past thirty years. He notes as well the fruitful links to be made between Hoggart's method and findings and aspects of popular culture in the United States. |
From inside the book
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... writers as politically diverse as Jose Ortega y Gasset , T.S. Eliot , Matthew Arnold , F. R. Leavis , George Orwell , and Theodor Adorno , as if they shared a similar hostility to mass society and the new ' mass culture ' . Once again ...
... writing about the 1950s in Britain , but his ideas are relevant now , for those texts whose ideological core rests on assumptions about the superiority of working - class forms of knowledge - forms which are presented as experiential ...
... writing about the public conduct of politics in contemporary America , and one would barely have to alter a single word : ' As the " personalising " technique becomes yearly more machine - tooled , so a good instinct is pulled out of ...
... writer for one of the so - called ' quality ' newspapers than a man in touch with working- class culture . Ethnography was to take hold of these barely - concealed prejudices and dismantle them , eventually providing us with a rich ...
... writer in having some sympathy for it . ) But it nonetheless remains intellectually inadequate . And it serves as a reminder of the limitations of interdisciplinary studies , where individual competence may often be the weak link in a ...
Contents
xlv | |
3 | |
11 | |
16 | |
22 | |
d Father | 32 |
e The Neighbourhood | 35 |
THEM AND US | 46 |
d Living in the Present and Progressivism | 141 |
Personalisation and Fragmentation | 145 |
INVITATIONS TO A CANDYFLOSS WORLD THE NEWER MASS ART | 155 |
i Weekly Family Magazines | 159 |
ii Commercial Popular Songs | 168 |
d The Results | 175 |
THE NEWER MASS ART SEX IN SHINY PACKETS | 186 |
b The Spicy Magazines | 189 |
b Usthe Best and the Worst of It | 52 |
Living and Letting Live | 61 |
THE REAL WORLD OF PEOPLE | 70 |
b Primary Religion | 77 |
c Illustrations from Popular ArtPegs Paper | 84 |
THE FULL RICH LIFE | 94 |
Excursions into the Baroque | 100 |
c Illustrations from Popular ArtClubSinging | 107 |
Yielding Place to New | 123 |
UNBENDING THE SPRINGS OF ACTION | 125 |
b Tolerance and Freedom | 130 |
The Group Sense and Democratic Egalitarianism | 132 |
c Sexandviolence Novels | 194 |
UNBENT SPRINGS A NOTE ON A SCEPTICISM WITHOUT TENSION | 208 |
b Some Allegorical Figures | 216 |
UNBENT SPRINGS A NOTE ON THE UPROOTED AND THE ANXIOUS | 222 |
A Nostalgia for Ideals | 233 |
CONCLUSION | 244 |
b Summary of Present Tendencies in Mass Culture | 254 |
Postscript | 267 |
Notes and References | 283 |
Bibliography | 308 |
Index | 313 |