"lumbering our minds with literature..."

"Somewhere between prayer and revolution....:"

"This is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation spread before our eyes...I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning. This, then, was the difficulty, this sweet dessert in the morning and the assumption that the sheltered, educated girl has nothing to do with the bitter poverty and the social maladjustment which is all around her, and which, after all, cannot be concealed, for it breaks through poetry and literature in a burning tide which overwhelms her." -Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House







Friday, April 9, 2010

The Eternal Triangle

The "eternal triangle" of gender, race, and socioeconomic class has informed literary studies for a long time now, but it is generally accepted that gender and race get more critical attention. John Guillory gives the following explanation: "for while it is easy enough to conceive of a self-affirmative racial or sexual identity, it makes very little sense to posit an affirmative lower-class identity, as such an identity would have to be grounded in the experience of deprivation per se."

I'm trying to consider what it means to reject the idea that a working class identity is grounded in deprivation without romanticizing poverty. For now, though, I will affirm the happy events in Franklinton this week and leave the rest for my dissertation...

*celebrating Junior's birthday with our amazingly supportive family at St. John's
*kids on spring break riding their bikes and enjoying the sun
*breaking ground at the 123 community garden this Saturday

And so much more to look forward to this summer!

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