Research and scholarship
Research and scholarship
Research project
My research examines representations and presence of working-class subjectivities within contemporary British Literature (post 2000, and with particular reference to post-2008 Literature). Chapters include: Work and Capital; Creativity and Alternative Practices; History/Hauntology; Depictions of the working-class within media and institutional forms, and reproductions/subversions of working-class personae; Places and psychogeographies.
Following my Dissertation this research draws upon established connections and tensions between the Derridean haunt and the Deleuzean ‘becoming’ as well as the ‘trioletical’ or ‘third’ figure, to establish ontological foundations for zones and bodies historical, becoming and virtualized within modern-day British literary universes containing a ‘working-class’ presence in their structure of feeling.
It seeks to consider class as constituted by memories, positions, cultural sediments and economic transitions as well as partially permeable and fungible, thus taking in a variety of class-subjectivities around work, creativity, gender, ethnicity and political emancipation. The study explores ethics of representation (after Emmanuel Levinas, and Derek Attridge on literature’s ‘peculiar’ event, as well as Nicholas Royle’s ‘veering’) and accounts of agency within a broadly (post)post structuralist framework which seeks to fulfil David Punter’s claim for the ‘haunt’ as the ‘most material’ ways of seeing things within contemporary space. It looks to do so through an approach that fuses work on ‘difference’ and liminality with a cultural materialist framework to perceive class-subjects in relation to the spatial-temporal post-crash austerity environment - along with a perceived wider-crisis in neoliberalism- and discover new equivalents of Ian Haywood’s archetypical ‘working-class realism’. In the process it will approach performativity and virtualization in the context of Claire Colebrook’s poststructuralist revival of irony (after Linda Hutcheon), Alison Lee and Lynn Wells’s work on anxiety and the attempted recuperation, through literature, of historical-narrative in post-modern milieus. It also draws upon my earlier Masters-study readings of the grotesque and collectively subversive in the light of the liminal relationship between ‘haunting’ and ‘possession’ in spectral materiality and subjectivities. This study specifically engages with the most contemporary treatments of working-class literary subjectivity, including the post-Williamsian postcolonial frame of Sonali Perera (2014) , John Lavelle’s post-Foucaultian reading of working-class literature (2014) and the anti-work autonomist literary subjectivities explored by Roberto del Valle Alcala (2016).
Primary texts at this stage include those Jon McGregor, Ross Raisin, Lisa Blower, Sunjeev Sahotta, as well as a range of ‘canonical’ and critically surveyed works by the likes of Monica Ali, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh and Zadie Smith; it will also pay attention to the recent experimental literary and mixed fiction-factual work , centering around place and subcultures, published by such independent presses as Salt, Dodo Ink and Dead Ink.
It is grounded in work done within contemporary sociology, including that of Justin Gest (2016), Evans/Tilley (2016), Pilkington (2016 ), Simpson and Hughes(2016 ), Kirsteen Paton (2014) , Walker and Roberts (2015), and Silva (2016) on gendered labour practices and class, intersections of class and ethnicity/sexuality/disability, the effects of gentrification, voting patterns and self- identifications with both rooted-places and (post-Foucaultian) heterotopic zones. It will also draw upon Anoop Nayak, Vik Loveday and other sociological theorists of nostalgia and collective temporality in relation to the practice of memories –individual and communal- around working-classhood and those fantasies available within the community or idioculture. Predominant Bourdieuan notions of intra-class distinction will be read against the rejection of ‘class-names’ within Rancierean-influenced critiques like Isobel Tyler’s. Following Tyler, Beverley Skeggs ,Lisa Mckenzie and Elias Le Grande my study examines accounts of media representations around ‘respectability’ , ‘revolt’ and abjection in relation to variants of autonomism and notions of widespread cross -class precariaty, before finding corollaries within literature. Spatially, the study examines estates literature, ‘edgelands’ , villages and seasides as well as the urban through the work done around psychogeography by Tina Richardson in her schizocartographical accounts after Guattari and Doreen Massey’s Soja/Deleuze-inflected work on ‘place’, Christopher Collier on autonomist-influenced psychogeographical practices and Kim Duff’s literary-studies accounts of post-Thatcherite textual spaces/places.
This study will explore how, in temporal and conceptual terms, contemporary literatures present subjectivity through subjectively continuous and dyschronic narration, heteroglossic narrative forms and the effects of environment practices upon temporality, (whether ‘capital’-flow speed or decay-time). Finally, in terms of political agency and imaginary my research approaches the Gramscian view of class resistance through Nicholas Thorburn’s accounts of autonomism, as well as attempts to overcome left melancholia about class (e.g Simon Charlesworth’s phenomenological study) by the likes of Fisher (with ‘acid communism’) and his affective future-driven politics of freedom, by Jeremy Gilbert which similarly map and theorise resistance (‘acid Corbynism’), and through the political dimensions of psychogeographical practice (as practised by the LPA) as well as Bifo Berardi’s political-poetics.
