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The Uses of Literacy (Hardcover)
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The Uses of Literacy (Hardcover)
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This 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.
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