John Ezard's obituary of Richard Hoggart in today's Guardian is one of the best I've read in a while. Sadly he (Ezard) is no longer with us and we can but lament that we won't be seeing more from him. I wrote something a few years ago about Hoggart inspired by reading one of the volumes of his autobiography.
I first read The Uses of Literacy almost exactly 20 years after it was published and it described a world that for my generation had already long vanished. And yet what I took away from it was not the celebration of a particular sort of working class life but something much more important: the sense that literary culture was important, discussion of it serious and that flippancy about it not something that a child from my sort of background could afford. In short it was one of the things that legitimated my growing feeling that it was OK to have intellectual interests in a world where few did.
I believe this is one of the reasons I get mad with the sort of academic, all to common in sociology, that treats the production of words as a mere game. I can imagine that Hoggart appreciated the attitude to a craft that lay behind Bill Shankly's famous quip: 'Someone said to me 'To you football is a matter of life or death!' and I said "Listen, it's more important than that".
I believe this is one of the reasons I get mad with the sort of academic, all to common in sociology, that treats the production of words as a mere game. I can imagine that Hoggart appreciated the attitude to a craft that lay behind Bill Shankly's famous quip: 'Someone said to me 'To you football is a matter of life or death!' and I said "Listen, it's more important than that".
Rereading what I wrote four years ago, I'm pleasantly surprised to find that it still seems to hang together, though I am a bit puzzled by what I could possibly have meant by "matrix of discrimination". I suppose I should be thinking of motes and beams.
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1 comment:
The first book my PhD supervisor suggested I read was the Uses Of Literacy. My supervisor, whose been a Prof Emeritus for a few years now i.e. he's old, was a working class grammar school boy from oop North who'd gone to Oxford.
So do you read Hoggart as a ground breaking example of cultural studies, a resolutely British example of theory infused, but rarely explicitly worn analysis, as autobiography by proxy or as a piece of literature that captures the spirit, the mentalitie even of a certain class sub-strata at a specific point in time?
All of the above, which is why he did, does and will continue to matter. Bugger.
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