I'm doing a course called US! A Course On Working Class Fictions at the Toronto Anarchist U this fall....

INTRO

Class is a constant process of formation, it is how they eye us up and how we eye them up in an endless unfolding of power balances, institutional forms, desires, fears and fantasies. Hence this course runs from Charterism and socialism to the mass worker, then beyond to class displacement and what may be germs of wholly new class experiences in the slums of the south and the knowledge industries of the North.

Unfortunately a resurgent capitalism in the seventies and eighties destroyed class based movements, forcing its theory to retreat into the universities, where the flying Molotov and pickets of the street turned into the floating signifiers of academia, leaving our images of class paralyzed amidst the excitement of post-modernity. Any vision of class dominated by miners and factory workers, forgets what is truly revolutionary about the working class - how we push against our very definition as working class and try to outflank it.

The course has a few learning ambitions, firstly it hopes to develop a grab bag of concepts useful to a class conscious literary criticism today, without wearing ourselves out with the nauseating intricacies of critical theory. Most importantly through fiction it aims for a de-familiarization of our own lived experience - so we as readers look again at the unspoken in our own everyday, where we may see the cracks in capital and the swarms trying to rush it.

At the moment secondary readings are pretty minimal, though more will arise once people start to join the course. Don't worry about covering all of the material, the course is meant to revolve around themes--so if you can't read a fiction, then try read a secondary piece so you can still contribute.

Please email antrophe at gmail.com to be added to the course email list and begin to receive background reading updates.

Full details and reading list at: http://anarchistu.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Anarchistu/WorkingClassFictions