Contemporary Representations of Class - Detailseite

While it used to be a commonplace in British politics and media to assert the “end of class” or to proclaim a new “classless society” throughout the post-Thatcher years of the 1990s and early 2000s and to denounce everyone who even made an attempt at suggesting that British cultural life was still significantly shaped by social and economic inequalities, class has in recent years increasingly become the focus of research in sociology and cultural studies. As Anna Biressi and Heather Nunn assert in a recent publication, “[i]ndeed, if anything, the last few years, and especially those following the global financial crisis, have seen social class, in all of its guises, return to the centre of cultural, political and media agendas” (2013: 18).

In this course, we will examine precisely this “return” of social class and its guises. We will consider class and its intersections with other identity categories and subjectivities such as race, gender and age, and how they take shape in a new class discourse which also sees the emergence of the “underclass” debate and figures of social abjection like the “chav.” Starting with the reign of Margaret Thatcher and the 1980s, the course is designed to sketch the particularities of a contemporary discourse on class. We will familiarise ourselves with interdisciplinary approaches to the study of class and look at a range of texts, including political discourse, media representations of key events such as the Miners’ Strike and the English Riots as well as literary and filmic texts.

In the Lektürekurs, we will focus on reading theoretical and philosophical texts that shed light on a wide variety of contexts through which to understand the primary texts.

Reading:

Most material will be available on Moodle. Novels and films will have to be purchased individually. The list of texts and films will be provided during the first session.

Introductory reading:

Anna Biressi / Heather Nunn: Class and Contemporary British Culture. Palgrave, 2013.

Gary Day: Class. Routledge, 2001.