Richard Hoggart

This dissertation seeks to examine the canons of knowledge that have traditionally dominated Western culture, and asks whether it is possible to maintain such a canon in today’s fragmented, relativist society, especially one in which huge quantities of information are available at the touch of a button. It studies not only the conventional indicators, such as school and university curricula, but also the questions used in successful, prestigious quiz shows on TV and radio. The changing emphasis of these questions, and the social assumptions that underpin them, are discussed in the context of thinkers such as T.S. Eliot, Harold Bloom and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as members of the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools. Social class, gender and age are considered as factors that affect the knowledge of individuals and thus their status in situations where specific types of knowledge are valued; and the impact of neoliberal economics is also taken into account.

Dominant accounts of subcultural analysis have tended to read early British New Left writing on youth as a combination of high culturalist and neo-Marxist approaches. This article reassesses this position by showing the variety of methods and forms of analysis adopted by New Left writers in the 1950s, including autobiographical, ethnographic, sociological, cultural and fictional. In particular, it compares the writing on youth by Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and Colin MacInnes. It argues that their representations of youth were intricately bound up with general anxieties and concerns in 1950s culture, which created an ambiguous and dual interpretation of youth in ideological terms. It goes on to suggest that the way in which the subcultural subject was represented in textual and methodological terms affected the way in which it was interpreted ideologically. It also suggests that the traces of this representation are embedded in the way that youth is interpreted today.

The paper is about Vedic culture of Namboothiri society. Culture is ordinary; every human society has its own shapes, its own meanings, and its own purposes. Cultural studies are interested in lifestyle because the lifestyle is about everyday life defines identity, influences social relations and bestows meaning and value to artifacts in a culture. The Brahmanas of Kerala are known as Namboothiris. Historical evidence, as well as their own traditions, suggest that they came from North India and settle down in Kerala, migrating along the west coast. In fact, one sees this tradition all along the WestCoast from Sourashtra on; and the Brahmanical traditions in the Canarese (Karnataka) and Malabar Coasts are nearly identical to one another. Rigveda is a collection of poems, hymns, and invocation of deities, reflecting myths, rites, battles and insights of many kinds. Texts are procedures for rituals and rites of Brahmanas are generally derived from it. In yagam, Hothan through a chant of Rigveda manthrams invokes the God into the yajnavedi and their divine virtues into our souls(minds). The Vedic culture in Kerala is unique and self-contained. The Ghats, with an average elevation of 5,000ft; and roughly parallel to the west coast, some 30 km from the sea in the northern and about 60 km in the southern part of Kerala. There is one main gap, through which most east-west communication takes place. There is one main gap, the Pallakad gap, through which most east-west communication takes place. The Namboothiri are probably unique to have a sub-caste of Brahmanas who are excluded from vedams. A.D. Devoted to their rituals, tantric as well as Vedic, from which outsiders are excluded, they were relatively unaffected by modern education. Most Namboothiri's have been settled as peaceful villagers, country aristocrats, small landowners, connoisseurs of literature and the traditional arts (like Kathakali) scholars and gentlemen. The most conspicuous characteristics of Namboothiri are simplicity and exclusiveness, obviously, the former predicate does not extend to their rituals.

We are living through a period of mature neoliberal governance in which the disorientation of working-class politics in affluent liberal democracies has reached a critical state. A salient feature of neoliberalism is the devaluation and virtual erasure of the rich heritage of a generations-long struggle waged by the working class to achieve political visibility at the formative stages of industrialized capitalism. This paper is an unpublished draft of the fourth and final chapter of my book, Landscape and Labour: Work, Place and the Working Class in Eliot, Hardy and Lawrence (Rowman & Littlefield). Motivated by the spirit of the British cultural theorists Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, the book examines crucial evocations of working-class life in the novels of Eliot, Hardy and Lawrence with a view to renewing contemporary democratic political culture.

"“corrupt and moronic though the common people are seemingly becoming ... only in the common people can the true work be rooted, the true tradition rediscovered and re-informed” Charles Parker, BBC Radio Producer 1959.

In 1958, in his best-selling book Culture and Society, Raymond Williams identified working-class culture as ‘a key issue in our own time’. Why this happened and how this subject was thought about and acted upon is the focus of this book. Paul Long investigates a variety of projects and practices that were designed to describe, validate, reclaim, rejuvenate or generate ‘authentic’ working-class culture as part of the re-imagining of Britishness in the context of the post-war settlement.

Detailed case studies cover the wartime cultural activities of CEMA – the forerunner of the Arts Council - the Folk Revival, the impact of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, broadcasting and the radio work of Charles Parker, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, the roots of modern arts festivals in Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42 project as well as the impact of progressive education on children’s writing and the politics of the English language.

‘Only in the Common People: The Aesthetics of Class in Post-War Britain’ examines the assumptions, idealism and prejudices behind these projects and the terms of class as ‘the preoccupation of a generation’. This approach offers a historicisation of the broader ideas and debates that informed the development of the New Left and British social history and cultural theory, offering an understanding of the rise of respect for ‘the common man’.
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This cultural study compares John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s approaches to the theme of belonging through representations of home, class, nation and religion. It discusses their songs written as leaders of The Beatles from 1962-9 and also their solo work from 1968 onwards. Expanding theoretical models from Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), the study relates differences and similarities in their perspectives as songwriters to their class origins. Hoggart’s arguments concerning home and class are set in dialogue with Anderson’s concerning nation. Musicological terms from Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘On Popular Music’ (1941) are employed to supplement Hoggart’s writings on the genre.
Chapter 1 critiques related studies. Chapter 2 compares the theoretical arguments drawn from Hoggart, Anderson and Adorno. Chapter 3 argues that home, the predominant, evolving motif of belonging throughout the songs, illustrates both lyricists’ emergence from working-class song traditions as critiqued by Hoggart. Gender representations are compared. Chapter 4 examines Lennon and McCartney’s family and class origins. Distinctions in the songwriters’ backgrounds are identified and aligned with different social views in their lyrics. I expand on Hoggart’s terms to distinguish McCartney’s “working-class” focus on the concrete from Lennon’s “uprooted” focus on the conceptual. Chapter 5 compares avant-garde influences in Lennon and McCartney’s songs and considers how these suggested changes in the class belonging of popular music. Chapter 6 compares ideas of community in the two songwriters’ work. Focusing on religion, “race” and protest, the chapter argues against Anderson’s theoretical tenets of how nations are imagined as communities despite inequality. Chapter 6 also utilises my specially-conducted correspondence to argue the important influence of local black Liverpool musicians on The Beatles in 1959-61.
The thesis concludes that McCartney’s focus on the real and concrete and Lennon’s on the radical and conceptual are mutually flattering, and that the evolving theme of belonging is central to the cultural significance of their work.

'Cultural studies: two paradigms' is an article written by Stuart Hall in which the two paradigms of cultural studies are explored critically. What follows is a response to this. The two paradigms, namely the culturalist and the structuralist modes of thinking have emerged at two different points of time in the realm of cultural studies. It throws light to the fact that the way culture has been conceptualized has undergone tremendous changes in the discipline of cultural studies. Both these paradigms, which mark a thorough departure from the conventional ways of looking at culture, have contributed substantially to the growth and development of cultural studies as an institutionalized discipline and as an analytical project.

With close reference to Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), this chapter emphasises the influence of working-class culture on the songwriting of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. The chapter also discusses Hoggart's rarely-cited (and often cautious) comments on The Beatles' work. (This chapter was published in the edited collection Richard Hoggart: Culture and Critique, edited by Michael Bailey and Mary Eagleton (Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, Nottingham UK, 2011).

This essay focuses on a key moment of transition in the history of modern youth culture in Britain, shortly before the more spectacular explosions of the 1960s. I look at a range of films, books and other publications that almost all appeared in the year 1959. These include the films Beat Girl, Expresso Bongo and The Lambeth Boys; Colin MacInnes’s novel Absolute Beginners (and its much later adaptation into film); and the work of academics in the emerging field of Cultural Studies, including Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. In very different ways, these texts all capture a sense of impending social change, which they anticipate with a mixture of hope and foreboding.

This essay is part of a larger project, Growing Up Modern: Childhood, Youth and Popular Culture Since 1945. More information about the project, and illustrated versions of all the essays can be found at: https://davidbuckingham.net/growing-up-modern/.

This 2008 book chapter compares Lennon and McCartney's songs, together and apart, with particular reference to social class, religion, and nationalism. Based on a paper at the Salford University conference 'Displacement and Belonging in the Modern World' (2007).

On the usefulness of works by Adorno, Hoggart and Anderson in studying popular music, with particular reference to Lennon and McCartney. Chapter from AHRC-funded doctoral thesis (Leeds Metropolitan University, 2010). Examiners: Professor Max Farrar and Professor Sheila Whiteley.

This article analyses the ways in which Richard Hoggart, in "The Uses of Literacy" (1957), evokes the class nuances of the working-class culture of his childhood while deprecating the popular culture of his own day. It is argued that despite his judgemental attitude, his literary evocation of the contemporary popular culture that he dislikes leaps to life in a manner comparable to Joyce's "Ulysses" and overpowers his arguments against it.

This article explores the institutionalization of cultural studies relative to changes taking place in North American universities and the global book publishing industry. Assuming that the publishing industry is a key site in which cultural studies gets negotiated and defined, I ask: what are the politics of publishing cultural studies? I argue that the demands of contemporary university life and current publishing practices potentially lend themselves to a banal and depoliticized, or worse yet a politically retrograde, ‘global’ cultural studies, in which the important work of many scholars working outside the field’s Anglophone centers ironically becomes marginalized. I conclude by exploring how those who practice and publish cultural studies might approach publishing projects in a manner more sensitive to the field’s own global information
flows.

Politics and the Scottish Language collects for the first time Macdonald Daly’s many essays on literature and culture (with politics never far away).As well as the title essay, which uniquely maps choices in the literary usage of Scottish accent and dialect onto demonstrable political perspectives, it encompasses discussions of fiction by Elizabeth Gaskell, H. G. Wells, John Herdman, George Orwell, Anthony Burgess and Ellis Sharp. Daly’s groundbreaking essay on Scottish poets of the First World War is also included. The work of literary critics and theorists such as Harold Bloom, Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and Fredric Jameson is critically scrutinised. The book closes with four signature essays addressing contemporary issues in which culture and politics collide, including Daly’s singular analysis of the rôle of tabloid newspapers in the 1992 UK General Election.

I. Genese und Dynamik der Form Formen reisen. Sie verändern ihren Ort und sind auch intern dynamisch: auf Zeit stabile Arrangements heterogener Bestandteile. 1 Das gilt auch für die Autosoziobiographie. Keine literarische Form ist je aus dem Nichts geschaffen worden, jede wurde im Rückgriff auf vorfindliche Elemente zusammengesetzt. Die Benennung trägt zu ihrer Stabilisierung bei. In diesem Fall stützt sie sich auf die Bemerkung Annie Ernaux', einige ihrer Texte seien "moins autobiographiques que autosocio-biographiques". 2 Das aus dem Beiwort gebildete Substantiv soll, Ernaux' Erklärung gemäß, besagen, dass solche Texte vermittels einer individuellen Lebensgeschichte Soziales zur Darstellung bringen. 3 Da die Autorin wiederholt die Bedeutung der Soziologie Pierre Bourdieus für ihr Schreiben betont hat, wird die neue Gattung als wissenschaftsnah angesehen. Mit Blick auf ein erweitertes Korpus fällt auf, dass insbesondere das Konzept der sozialen Klasse für solches Erzählen vom eigenen Leben unter gesellschaftlichen Bedingungen leitend ist.

n calling for an expanded geography of education, Thiem (2009) noted increasing research in the geographies of social reproduction. Recent work has examined a theoretical framework for social reproduction which now occurs at a global scale (Katz, 2001; Mitchell 2003, Waters 2006) but theories of local urban social reproduction has received less attention. Whilst there can be no doubt that market-oriented, neo-liberal school reform and global flows of students are re-shaping patterns of social reproduction at an international scale, nationally social reproduction within urban education systems are experienced by the majority of students and teachers primarily at a local-level. Drawing on Paul Willis' (1981) work, it is argued in this paper that there is a persistent conflation of different conceptions of social reproduction in reference to education. Although patterns of social reproduction at the level of the labour-force have clearly been affected by global migratory flows and weakening employment protection, it is not clear that the same theoretical lens can be applied to social reproduction within education. With reference to the British context, I argue that transmission of social class position through the education system remains primarily determined by, and experienced through, educational reform at a national scale and neighbourhood-school inequalities at a local level. Drawing on fieldwork with school-leavers in London as a global city, it is argued that patterns of local, urban social reproduction have mutated to reflect intake change and neoliberal school reform but that they nevertheless remain historically shaped by local and national processes.

En el presente artículo nos proponemos dar cuenta de los ejes principales abordados por Richard Hoggart en The uses of literacy (1957), analizando en particular ciertas cuestiones que, en la actualidad, hacen del libro una obra de imprescindible lectura en el campo de las ciencias sociales y humanas. Nos referimos, específicamente, a la importancia concedida por el autor a los terrenos de la educación y la cultura, en los que ve lugares estratégicos de confronte y lucha de clases en tanto ámbitos sumamente propicios para dar una batalla cultural frente al avance y la influencia cada vez mayores que los medios masivos de comunicación van teniendo, sobre todo en los sectores populares.

Com rigorosa observação dos modos de vida, das estruturas familiares, das relações entre gêneros e dos usos dos objetos que integravam o cotidiano das classes proletárias inglesas na primeira metade do século 20, Richard Hoggart , em As utilizações da cultura , desenvolveu uma etnografia e crítica literária que se tornou um clássico dos Estudos Culturais. Ao tratar a cultura como experiência vivida, que conformava as práticas sociais, e relacioná-la com os meios de comunicação de massa então emergentes e ameaçadores às tradições proletárias inglesas, Hoggart promoveu uma “virada cultural” acadêmica. O propósito do artigo, apresentado no Intercom Sul 2017, é examinar por que esta obra, escrita na década de 1950, serve até hoje como guia para pesquisadores que pretendem analisar as transformações das classes populares a partir de publicações direcionadas a elas.

This paper argues that Richard Hoggart’s legacy for democratic education is to be found in the moral unity of his life and work: his life as an adult educator, university professor, and international administrator; his distinctive idiom as writer and critic; and his commitment to education as a deeply deliberative process of widening participation. The right use of judgement is central to the life, the idiom and the commitment. As an abiding presence, Hoggart is an exemplar of how critical discrimination and discernment can be deployed, from the centre ground, in the interests of the good society.
[Versions of this paper appeared as 'Richard Hoggart's legacy for democratic education' in the International Journal of Cultural Studies (Special Issue: The Uses of Richard Hoggart) 10, 1 (March, 2007) pp. 63-71 and as 'The legacy of Richard Hoggart: education as democratic practice', in Owen, S. (ed) (2008) Re-Reading Richard Hoggart, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing pp. 26-42.]

La intención de este trabajo es presentar algunas características y definiciones de los llamados “Estudios Culturales”, para luego realizar una periodización adentrarnos en algunas polémicas desarrolladas en las últimas décadas. Se distinguirán tres etapas de este programa político-intelectual: la primera de carácter formativa en el contexto inglés de posguerra, la segunda desde la creación del Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies de la Universidad de Birmingham en 1964 y la última a partir de la segunda mitad de la década de 1980 cuando se acelera la institucionalización de los “Estudios Culturales” a la vez que consolida su expansión y giro programático luego de la caída del Muro de Berlín.

The article examines the Still Life paintings of the major Australian artist John Brack (1920-1999), specifically his "battle" series. It explains how we can understand these strange modernist pictures - which depict groups of pencils, pens and playing cards gathered on table tops - as signifying battles. Several specific paintings are analysed. Noting Brack's reference in conversation to Tolstoy, the discussion sets the paintings against the Russian novelist's explanation (in an article on "War & Peace") of how an artist or writer can represent something as complex as a battle. Especial attention is focussed on the still life painting based on a diagram of the Battle of Waterloo. The last part of the discussion probes the potential meaning of the later "Battle" still-life paintings, where the playing cards spell out words. A potential allusion here to Richard Hoggart's "The Uses of Literacy" is tested. pp8.

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Ce nouveau séminaire entend poser la question de l'acclimatation et de l'adaptation de théories et concepts modernes venus des Sciences Humaines et Sociales à des situations antiques et étudier de quelle manière ces dernières ont pu alimenter les réflexions d'auteur.e.s de ce domaine.

Analysant d’abord les hommages posthumes différenciés rendus à Richard Hoggart de part et d’autre de la Manche à sa mort en 2014, cet article défend l’hypothèse d’une double carrière de cette figure intellectuelle et de ses écrits au Royaume-Uni et en France. Auteur d’un succès de librairie lu au-delà du monde universitaire, fondateur institutionnel des cultural studies à Birmingham, Hoggart est toutefois rapidement vu dans ce domaine comme une référence à dépasser, alors que la traduction, en France, de deux de ses œuvres majeures (The Uses of Literacy et A Local Habitation) l’y transforme en sociologue. L’importation de ces textes dans les sciences sociales françaises a nourri la première critique d’importance, par Jean-Claude Passeron et Claude Grignon, du système conceptuel mis en place par Pierre Bourdieu, que la lecture de Hoggart a d’abord implicitement nourri. Sélectives, les références à ses œuvres dans la sociologie de la culture ou des classes populaires se sont ensuite routinisées. Ces usages se sont toutefois accompagnés d’un héritage plus souterrain qui semble moins dépendant des frontières nationales. Hoggart a en effet été pionnier pour légitimer dans la recherche universitaire une prise de parole autobiographique marquée par la réflexivité. Les formes scientifiques d’un tel geste se sont cependant aussi conformées à des cadres disciplinaires et à des logiques épistémologiques de plus en plus distincts, propres à la sociologie française d’un côté et aux studies de l’autre.

Las dos (o tres) carreras de Richard Hoggart
Desdé la fundación de las cultural studies hasta la apropiación de la sociología francesa
Analizando primero los diferentes homenajes póstumos dados a Richard Hoggart en ambos lados del Canal de La Mancha a su muerte en 2014, este artículo defiende la hipótesis de una doble carrera de esta figura intelectual y de sus escritos en el Reino Unido y en Francia. Autor de un bestseller leído más allá del mundo académico, fundador institucional de las cultural studies en Birmingham, Hoggart fue sin embargo visto rápidamente en este campo como una referencia a superar, mientras que la traducción en Francia, de dos de sus obras importantes (The Uses of Literacy y A Local Habitation) lo transformaba en un sociólogo. La importación de estos textos en las ciencias sociales francesas alimenta la primera crítica importante de Jean-Claude Passeron y Claude Grignon, del sistema conceptual establecido por Pierre Bourdieu, que la lectura de Hoggart alimento primero de forma implícita. Selectivas, las referencias a su trabajo en la sociología de la cultura o de las clases populares se volvieron entonces rutinarias. Estos usos son, sin embargo, acompañados por un legado más subterráneo que parece menos dependientes de las fronteras nacionales. Hoggart era de hecho un pionero para legitimar en la investigación académica una voz autobiográfica marcada por la reflexividad. Las formas científicas de tal movimiento, sin embargo, también se conformaron a marcos disciplinarios y lógicas epistemológicas cada vez más distintas, propias a la sociología francesa por un lado y los studies del otro.

Analysing firstly the different posthumous tributes to Richard Hoggart on both sides of the Channel at his death in 2014, this article argues in favor of a double career of this intellectuel figure and of his books in the United Kingdom and in France. Author of a best-selling book, read outside the academic world, and institutional founder of cultural studies at Birmingham, Hoggart has however quickly been considered in this field as a key, if outdated, reference. The French translation of two of his major books, The Uses of Literacy and A Local Habitation, turned him into a sociologist. The importation of these textes into the French social sciences provided the first important criticism, by Jean-Claude Passeron and Claude Grignon, of Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual system – itself implicitly informed by Bourdieu’s reading of Hoggart. While selective, these uses have nevertheless also been accompanied by a more subterranean legacy that seems less dependent on the national borders. Hoggart has indeed been pioneer in legitimising an autobiographical mode of speaking in academic research, marked by reflexivity. The scientific forms of such a gesture have complied with more and more distinct disciplinary settings and epistemological logics, characteristic of French sociology on one side, and cultural studies on the other.

Esta ponencia se concentra en un análisis del Free Cinema, procurando identificar las modificaciones que introdujo en el proceso de producción cinematográfica, su dimensión política y su afinidad con la reformulación crítica del marxismo  emprendida por la Escuela de Birmingham. El Free Cinema es una corriente cinematográfica surgida en Gran Bretaña a mediados de la década de 1950, cuyas intenciones originales fueron explicitadas a través de una serie de manifiestos que acompañaron las primeras proyecciones del grupo. El manifiesto, punto de encuentro de las pasiones políticas y los impulsos estéticos, constituye un corpus privilegiado para iniciar un estudio de la articulación entre ambas dimensiones que luego se concentrará en las producciones audiovisuales. En primera instancia, la ponencia da cuenta de las rupturas formales y temáticas que caracterizan la irrupción del Free Cinema dentro del cine británico. A continuación, explora particularmente las transformaciones que supuso en los modos de representar y relacionarse con la clase obrera. Nos interesa rastrear cómo se manifiesta, en ese vínculo, un conjunto de asociaciones valorativas ligadas a formas específicas de alineamiento y compromiso político que colocan al Free Cinema en las proximidades de los Estudios Culturales

Critical reflection on Hoggart's legacy, including his relevance to university teaching and also the mediation of British politics in 2014. First published as a news item on the blog of Rowman & Littlefield International after Hoggart's death in April 2014.

"Richard Hoggart stressed the importance of literary criticism in cultural studies. What may seem an antitheoretical empiricism—a common criticism made about Hoggart—is, in fact, a recognition of the concreteness of culture, and his work moves between the particularisation that literary criticism brings to the fore and the scientific, sociological attitude. It is thus not at all untheoretical and is genuinely dialectical.

Part of Hoggart’s concern with literature is an affirmation of the idea of literary value and, recently, an attack on relativism. This affirmation is in turn concerned with the power of great literature to complement the generalisations of sociology by concretely dramatising the spirit of a culture.

In addition, literature for Hoggart is a counterbalance to instrumental reason, as shown in his later polemics against philistinism. Thus, literate sociology is more than an analytical method: it is a principled and critical stance against the dehumanisation of society.

This paper shows how Hoggart practices this literate sociology from The Uses of Literacy through Speaking to Each Other whose very structure, divided as it is into a volume on Literature and one on Society, displays this dialectic, to the polemics of The Way We Live Now.
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