We will pay handsomely that man who gives some release to our sense of inferiority by expressing himself violently in print on what we all hate.” Katie Hopkins, anyone? Hoggart goes on to say: “It seems to me evident that most our popular journals have become a good deal worse during the last fifteen or twenty years”. Plus ca change and all that. This attempt to understand the changes in British culture after the second world war in which the mobilisation of the home front had ushered in “massification” – mass society and mass culture – will resonate with any reader struggling to make sense of the Brexit referendum vote. It seemed like it might be interesting in light of our module and seminar discussions, so I read on…

The Uses of Literacy is a book written by Richard Hoggart and published in 1957, examining the influence of mass media in the United Kingdom. [1] The book has been described as a key influence in the history of English and media studies and in the founding of cultural studies. [2] [3] Massification of culture [ edit ] Hall, S. (1980). ‘Cultural Studies and The Centre: Some Problems and Problematics’, in Culture, Media, Language, ed. S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis. London: Hutchinson and The Centre For Cultural Studies. Hoggart’s definition of mass product was something that contained no emotional truth – nothing that could be measured or felt as real, however painful that reality might be to confront – because it was produced by people who believed their audience had no ability or desire to detect that truth. “Sex-and-violence novels,” he wrote, epitomised “an endless and hopeless tail-chasing evasion of the personality”, a description that could have been taken from a review of Fifty Shades of Grey.” Its primary importance, I’m to understand, is as a landmark of cultural studies – in which respect it is a curious blend of current observation and self-ethnography (making it already a bit of a curiosity and as much autobiography as treatise).Hoggart, R. (1970). ‘Schools of English and Contemporary Society’, Speaking To Each Other, Vol. II. London: Chatto and Windus. In this climate, gravity becomes a cardinal sin, to the extent that ‘nothing was told straight’. The readership is infantilised by the assumption that plain facts and news have to be sensationalised to grab attention. Hoggart’s other bête noire is the Americanisation of culture, with its glamorisation of violence and rootlessness. How did our culture became so polarised – and what can Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, written 60 years ago, teach us about how we live today?” He was witnessing a change of these relationships as people moved out of the communities of the past and into new council housing in England. He was concerned that this change diminished the ‘we’re all in this together’ feel of the communities and therefore acted to undermine working class feeling and sensibility. He is also clearly worried that the rising materialism of the working classes (perhaps consumerism is a better word here) was also destroying working class community and creating instead a form of isolated individualism. Yes, as some reviewers have said, this book is old fashioned. However, it is still relevant for two reasons.

Hall, S. (1997). “The Centrality of Culture”: Notes On The Revolutions Of Our Time’, in Media and Cultural Regulation, ed. K. Thompson. Vol. 6 of the Culture, Media and Identities Course Books. London: Sage and Open University. Hall, S. (1981). ‘De-constructing The Popular’, in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel. History Workshop Series. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Williams, R. (1957). ‘Working-Class Culture’, The Uses of Literacy Symposium, Universities and Left Review, 2, Summer. This is a book I've meant to read for years. It's a bit of an icon, because when it was published it was something genuinely new; an attempt to pin down the culture of the northern working classes and assess how general social changes have influenced it. As such, it was a pioneer of that much-derided and misunderstood area of academia, Media Studies. The general effect of all the new tendencies is a growing estrangement from the real lives of the majority of ordinary people. Even songs that used to unify with a sense of shared experience are now targeted at the individual in a superficial way. Hoggart, R. (1992). An Imagined Life. Life and Times, Vol. III: 1959–1991. London: Chatto and Windus. I bought this book at the time, on his recommendation, but never actually read it. All the same, it has turned up repeatedly over the years, mentioned in other books I did read. And now that I have read it, I didn’t expect it to be nearly as interesting or as affecting as it has turned out to be.

It is often said that there are no working classes in England now, that a ‘bloodless revolution’ has taken place, which has so reduced social differences that already most of us inhabit an almost flat plain, the plain of the lower-middle to middle classes.” Three to Compare To this reader, sadly, apart from one arresting piece of brilliant nonsense (“ Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”), Chomsky’s masterpiece is unreadable. I’m sorry: no doubt, as some have suggested, Syntactic Structures is comparable to the work of Keynes or Freud. On my reading, on behalf of the common reader, the presumed audience for a list such as ours, it is also unintelligible. Anyway, I just thought that the article was an interesting link between reading, community and contemporary culture, and wanted to share it with you all,What’s most interesting to me is the record it gives of pre-war and immediately post war street-level culture (books, music, fashion, consumerism), and its often rounded and enduring pronouncements on popular ways and vices. There’s a lot that seemingly hasn’t changed and could be said as much of a middle class as a working class now: the (healthy and unhealthy) cynicism about politics which still afflicts us (all that ‘they’re all the same’; they’re in it for themselves’); the disdain for intellectualism (generally healthy) and the eternal power of the folksy cliché and the ‘mustn’t grumble’ shrug.