EXPLORING WORKING CLASS CULTURE Experience, Representation and Change Essay

EXPLORING WORKING CLASS CULTURE Experience, Representation and Change - Essay Example The proposal is made stating that working class culture can be understood by knowing and appreciating working class experiences in fields such as history, literature, cinema and soccer. This paper seeks to determine whether this approach is able to provide a single unifying thread common to all forms of working class culture which would help greatly in understanding its nature and form. Class experiences in literature and soccer are explored and analyzed on whether they shed light on the working class phenomenon. Can we find working class identity in the portrayals contained in literature? Working class identity is often associated with a person’s economic condition. Members of the working class are said to be those who produce the enormous wealth of capitalists and of nations but received only a small part of that wealth as wages. As Arbor (1994) had put it, they are the workers (slave, free, immigrants, locals, men and women) who share a common place of production with little control over the pace, content and products of their work and are not anyone’s boss. Working class culture and its members are considered almost diametrically opposed to high culture associated with the elite. Nonetheless, confining working class identity to economic conditions is limited as it also includes lived experiences, expectations, legacies and set of relationships. In retrospect, one cannot establish find a single discreet identity in working class culture but would instead find an uneasy and unstable amalgam of hybrid and fluid multiple identities. Working class literature and soccer involvement serves to illuminate those experiences, relationships and diversity by revealing the intricate world of class experience as it is lived by working class people. Will an analysis of the class experience narrated in working class literature and involvement in soccer