| Social class analysis has historically been a modernist enterprise, with the Marxian framework as its mission statement. Within this enterprise the working-class subject has one role to play: proletarian revolutionary. Even though individual and social practices have undergone radical changes in the last 150 years, and even though the cultural dimensions of social class, in practice and theory, now complement the onceincontrovertible economic dimensions, Marx and his modernism-colored predispositions and insights still figure deeply into contemporary class analysis.; Paradoxically connected to the treatment of social class, in America at least, are the master narratives of upward mobility and American exceptionalism---two beliefs that have long governed the general American attitude toward social class. In America, social class exists on a mythological plain as a tool to repudiate class, as the other side of the binary of American classlessness. In such a mechanism, the working-class subject and working-class culture are relegated to invisibility at best and pathology at worst.; In this dissertation I interrogate the modernistic paradigms in which most conversations, a word that carries a dual-treatment of the working class given that working-class subjectivity is controlled not by the working-class subject, but instead delivered through middle-class ventriloquism, on the working class take place. I stress the textual dimensions of the working class, arguing that working-class culture is not a monolithic structure or statically lived experience, but rather that the culture is textual, subject to myriad influences and practices---economic, political, and a significant number of other cultural forces.{09}In the end, I argue that by daring to treat working-class identities and texts as textual, as ornamental, as byproducts of modernist inclinations to privilege social action through self-marginalization, and as rhetorical, different chances are created for reconstituted analytical frameworks. Working-class texts do not require representation, but rather perpetual theorization based upon contingency, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity.; The most effective way to locate and reconsider the modernistic impulse, that inclination to stabilize class ideologies and historicize a fundamental reference for the transmission and enactment of such ideologies, in conversations on the working class is to investigate the forms it takes in three of dominant culture's most persuasive meaning-making and---shaping machines---mass media, literature, and education. As important tools/edifices of middle-class dominant cultural indoctrination, these institutions are responsible for the endless echo of modernistic depictions of class in American society today. The reframing and unhinging of the cultural products of these institutions is sorely needed for and long overdue in the analysis of social class. |
