The twentieth-century witnessed a boom in publishing ‘ordinary’ people’s life stories, both biography and autobiography. In this week's seminar, we will explore the connections between these, considering whose voices get to count as 'social science' and issues of ordinariness. In the last session, we were also introduced to the world of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the activist practice of Stuart Hall. Now, we will turn our attention to the 'other' founder of cultural studies in Britain: Richard Hoggart (1918-2014). More specifically, we will focus on the ways in which Hoggart and his contemporaries understood changes to class identities, and with it shifts in how class was narrativised.

Readings

Lynn Abrams, 'Heroes of their own life stories: narrating the female self in the feminist age', Cultural and Social History, 16:2 (2019), pp. 205-224

Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: aspects of working-class life (originally published 1957 - available as an e-book from the Library), chapter 10, 'Unbent springs: a note on the uprooted and the anxious'

Claire Langhamer, '"Who the hell are ordinary people?" Ordinariness as a category of historical analysis', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 28 (2018), pp. 175-195

Emily Robinson, Camilla Schofield, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson, 'Telling stories about post-war Britain: popular individualism and the "crisis" of the 1970s', Twentieth Century British History, 28:2 (2017), pp. 268-304

Mike Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: the politics of method (Oxford: OUP, 2010), chapter 7, '1951: the interview and the melodrama of social mobility', pp. 165-186

Carolyn Steedman, 'State-sponsored autobiography', in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity: reconstructing Britain, 1945-1964 (London: Rivers Oram, 1999)

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968-2000 (Cambridge: CUP, 2018), chapter 3, 'Working-class autobiography, c.1970-1985', pp. 56-77

Rob Waters, Thinking Black: Britain, 1964-1985 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018), chapter 4, 'Black Studies', pp. 125-164

Seminar questions

• Why was there demand for working-class autobiography towards the end of the twentieth century?
• What does it mean to write 'autobiographically'?
• What role does mass literacy play in the development of autobiography as a phenomenon that is both social and reflects society?
• What common themes emerge in these texts, and how far is it possible to read these through shared 'cultural scripts'?
• Does the history of the social sciences we have been exploring on this module offer any framework for understanding and interpreting working-class autobiography?
• Are there any exclusions from these texts?

Further resources

Stephen Brooke, 'Revisiting Southam Street: class, generation, gender, and race in the photography of Roger Mayne', Journal of British Studies, 53 (2014), pp. 453-496

Ian Grosvenor and Alison Hall, 'Back to School from a Holiday in the Slums!: images, words and inequalities', Critical Social Policy, 32:1 (2011), pp. 11-30

Ian Grosvenor and Natasha Macnab, 'Photography as an agent of transformation: education, community and documentary photography in post war Britain', Paedagogica Historica, 51:1-2 (2015), pp. 117-135

Tony Harcup, 'An insurrection in words: East End voices in the 1970s', Race and Class, 51:2 (2009), pp. 2-17

Christopher Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: the democratisation of writing in Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)

Jon Lawrence, 'Inventing the "Traditional Working Class": a re-analysis of interview notes from Young and Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London', The Historical Journal, 59 (2016), pp. 567–93

Joseph Maslen, 'Autobiographies of a generation? Carolyn Steedman, Luisa Passerini and the memory of 1968', Memory Studies, 6:1 (2013), pp. 23-36

Stuart Middleton, 'E.P. Thompson and the cultural politics of literary modernism', Contemporary British History, 28:4 (2014), pp. 422-437

Frank Mort, 'Social and symbolic fathers and sons in postwar Britain', Journal of British Studies, 38:3 (1999), pp. 353-384

Chris Searle, 'The story of Stepney Words', Race and Class, 58:4 (2017), pp. 57-75

Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (London: Virago, 1986), especially part one, 'Stories'

Tom Woodin, Working-Class Writing and Publishing in the Late Twentieth Century: literature, culture and community (Manchester: MUP, 2018)

Title slide from the Man Alive episode 'Top Class People' (BBC Two, 10 May 1967).