The Uses of Literacy (Pelican) - Softcover

Hoggart, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140204318 ISBN 13: 9780140204315

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1969

Synopsis

This pioneering work examines changes in the life and values of the English working class in response to mass media. First published in 1957, it mapped out a new methodology in cultural studies based around interdisciplinarity and a concern with how texts-in this case, mass publications-are stitched into the patterns of lived experience. Mixing personal memoir with social history and cultural critique, The Uses of Literacy anticipates recent interest in modes of cultural analysis that refuse to hide the author behind the mask of objective social scientific technique. In its method and in its rich accumulation of the detail of working-class life, this volume remains useful and absorbing.

Hoggart's analysis achieves much of its power through a careful delineation of the complexities of working-class attitudes and its sensitivity to the physical and environmental facts of working-class life. The people he portrays are neither the sentimentalized victims of a culture of deference nor neo-fascist hooligans. Hoggart sees beyond habits to what habits stand for and sees through statements to what the statements really mean. He thus detects the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances.

Through close observation and an emotional empathy deriving, in part, from his own working-class background, Hoggart defines a fairly homogeneous and representative group of working-class people. Against this background may be seen how the various appeals of mass publications and other artifacts of popular culture connect with traditional and commonly accepted attitudes, how they are altering those attitudes, and how they are meeting resistance. Hoggart argues that the appeals made by mass publicists-more insistent, effective, and pervasive than in the past-are moving toward the creation of an undifferentiated mass culture and that the remnants of an authentic urban culture are being destroyed.

In his introduction to this new edition, Andrew Goodwin, professor of broadcast communications arts at San Francisco State University, defines Hoggart's place among contending schools of English cultural criticism and points out the prescience of his analysis for developments in England over the past thirty years. He notes as well the fruitful links to be made between Hoggart's method and findings and aspects of popular culture in the United States.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Hoggart, as professor of modern English literature at Birmingham University, founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. He has authored or edited over twenty-five books, including Between Two Worlds: Politics, Anti-Politics, and the Unpolitical, The Uses of Literacy, and The Tyranny of Relativism, all available from Transaction.

Review

"Hoggart has the rare quality of complete intellectual honesty. The Uses of Literacy should be read by all those concerned with the nature of modern society."—Asher Tropp, American Sociological Review

"This sort of modern Mayhew is worth any amount of statistics as background for cultural evalutions....Required reading for anyone concerned with the modern cultural climate."—Times Literary Supplement

“An exquisitely drawn picture of the urban working-class life in which the author grew up    this moving and thoughtful book deserves serious study.”—The Guardian

“I doubt that a better book on what has come to be called ‘mass’ or ‘popular’ culture has been written... Few social scientists can match Hoggart’s skills in conveying daily experience. “—Dennis H. Wrong. The Reporter

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1969
• ISBN 10: 0140204318
• ISBN 13: 9780140204315
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384