Comments on: Readings So Far

By: john

john — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Lots of good stuff on your list–and lots I don’t know. I would think top sociologists would have useful ways of producing operational definitions of “class”, but I’m a long way from that reading.

Sociolinguists like William Labov and Peter Trudgill have done very interesting studies for linguistic markers of class. Maybe you know that stuff and it doesn’t fit your focus, but compositon is a subset of the study of language, so I’d think it would be important.

There’s a book titled WorkTime by a prof out of u. of Washington (Evan Watkins, I think) that is an analysis of work generated in English departments, using a Marxist framework for analysis. I found the jargon infuriating, but he offers an interesting way of talking about all the “work” generated by an English department.

If you’ve read Gintis and Bowles, then you’ve probably seen some of that early stuff based on the “cooling out function” concept of community colleges. I still don’t seen how compositionists can address class in any form and not address institutional differences between universities and cc’s in class terms.

But I’m hardening my theory that the refusal to address community college composition in composition studies is a class issue that the Marxist types are blind to. Or don’t know how to deal with so they just ignore it.

Dick Ohmann and Bruce Horner, for instance, are very nice guys. But I don’t think they know anything about community colleges.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Thanks for this, Mike. Looks like an indispensible resource.

By: Eric Struch

Eric Struch — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

I’m a student at a city college in Chicago and I stumbled upon this blog while researching a paper for a social science class. The assignment was to descibe how I felt I fit into society, and what structure and what concept within culture I used to explain mt statement. It’s tentatively titled “Defining Class and ‘Serving the People’”. My teacher wants it in APA format , so the abstract goes like this– “This paper compares Marxist and non-Marxist definitions of class to see which correspond closest to this writer’s experience. It will build upon this to explain how social class and Marxism has informed this writer’s decision to become a teacher.” Could anyone suggest any readings I could use to define class from both a Marxist and a “bourgeois” perspective? I would really appreciate any help cuz I’m one of those people who waits ’till the last minute on these things. Thanx!

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Eric, I’d start with Raymond Williams’ ten-page historical definition of the term, in his book Keywords: really good, insightful stuff there. After that, the first and final chapters of Gilbert and Kahl’s The American Class Structure give a good, broad (albeit not terribly deep) view of all the different ways people — mostly sociologists — see class, and all the factors they see contributing to our sense of class. (In the fifth edition, it’s just Gilbert.) Resnick and Wolff, in the first chapter of Knowledge and Class, give their postmodern Marxian take on class, which is quite different from the classical Marxist perspective — which you can get from Williams and from the section of the 18th Brumaire he points you to. And, of course, there’s the billboard version in The Communist Manifesto that most folks will be familiar with.

Love to see what you come up with, if you feel like sharing it after you’re finished.