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.

Tearing down the fourth wall of the home, dramatists and novelists like John Osbourne documented the confusion of class identiy in the "pretty dreary...American age," with nothing to do but wait bored for the great bang of the H-bomb. In re-forging the nation's social contract, post war Britain and the "craddle to grave" schema of the welfare state saw political narratives rocket from traditional community relations of solidarity and struggle to an individuated relationship to the state, and then state blocs against state blocs, literature spilled into the micro cultures of the kitchen and family, and characters left with only new interior comforts in the artificial desires of consumerism and the rat race of social mobility.