Chris asked me a while ago about posting a list of what I’ve read so far, so here goes. There’s some stuff that I can’t figure out where to fit below, like Bizzell’s “Marxist Ideas” and the Jameson I read and the Web and cultural theory stuff, and I don’t really have a place to put Clark Kerr yet, but otherwise, what follows is an annotated rough list of my readings on class so far, or at least most of the major ones.
Foundational readings in economics
Heilbroner and Thurow, Economics Explained: Their politics are clearly of a liberal stripe, but they do a nice job of trying to explain the various perspectives on economics, using the economic holy trinity of Adam Smith, Keynes, and Marx to do so.
Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson: Highly conservative early neoclassical economics. Privileges efficiency and “fairness” (the system, of course, cannot be other than fair if you’re the one with the money) above all and snarls at those who do not.
Mankiw, Principles of Economics, Fifth Edition: Big fat Freshman Econ textbook; does both micro- and macroeconomics. Primarily neoclassical perspective, and doesn’t really even acknowledge that there are any other perspectives.
Resnick and Wolff, Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical: They’re Marxian economists, so you can guess which side of the “versus” they fall on, but they show a good grasp of the neoclassical side too, or at least as far as I can tell based on my other readings.
Marx: I’m figuring I can’t really rehearse the guy in a sentence, and I’m also figuring I don’t really need to.
Various definitions of class
Raymond Williams, Keywords: The ten-page historical definition of the word “class” alone makes this book worth the money, but Williams does the same excellent work with 175 other words like “community”, “sex”, “culture”, “media”, “community”, “capitalism”, and so on. (As you can tell, I’m kinda partial to the letter ‘c’.)
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction and Practical Reason: Need to re-read the former, but Bourdieu sets up a primarily cultural understanding of an infinitude of classes defined by difference across a relational field.
Gilbert and Kahl, The American Class Structure: A New Synthesis: As the title indicates, they try to put together a bunch of definitions and studies of class, primarily sociological, to construct an interestingly multiple definitition relying on all sorts of different factors. A bit diffuse, but thorough.
Resnick and Wolff, Knowledge and Class: Marxian re-definition of class as the processes of appropriation of surplus labor. Smart and thorough, but as far as I’m concerned, if it doesn’t talk about groups of people, it ain’t class.
Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism as We Know It: Follows Resnick and Wolff with a poststructuralist feminist reading of capitalism using R&W’s definition of class. Interesting for the possibilities it raises for counterhegemonic agency in the face of a perhaps not-so-monolithic capitalism, but a bit ludic for my tastes.
Kingston, The Classless Society: Believes in stratification theory, which contends that people can be stratified according to economic and other markers but that it doesn’t really matter because difference is good and we’re all OK anyway.
A bunch of intro sociology textbooks: no surprises.
Class in education
Jean Anyon, “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work”: Brilliant analysis following the work of Basil Bernstein and Bowles and Gintis where Anyon does a study in several elementary schools looking at how the schoolwork for students from various class background teaches them different sorts of tasks according to their social class and thereby reproduces the class structure.
Pierre Bourdieu, “Academic Discourse”: Fascinating study of how students from various class backgrounds see their relationships to the university.
Class in composition
James Berlin, Rhetoric and Reality: A history of composition from which I initially drew my understanding of the “liberal” versus “vocational” education models of the university.
John Trimbur, “Composition and the Circulation of Writing”: Uses a reading of Marx’s Grundrisse to examine the valuation of student writing. Sophisticated stuff.
Bruce Horner, Terms of Work for Composition: Uses Marx to look at the labor of student writing in terms of use value and exchange value. Excellent; difficult.
Linda Brodkey, “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in ‘The Literacy Letters'”: The most careful, methodical, and insightful treatment of class I’ve seen in composition. Uses a poststructural approach to investigate how the class of two groups of people limits the ways in which they communicate. Intimidatingly brilliant. Makes me happy every time I read it.
David Seitz, “Keeping Honest: Working-Class Students, Difference, and Rethinking the Critical Agenda in Composition”: Never defines class; only uses the term “working-class”, and then ignores Paulo Freire’s Marxism in his treatment of critical pedagogy.
Richard Ohmann, “Reflections on Class and Language Use”: Blistering critique of Basil Bernstein’s work on class and language use in education, relying on a strict Marxist definition of class (relations of production).
Julie Lindquist, “Class Ethos and the Politics of Inquiry: What the Barroom Can Teach Us about the Classroom”: Examines rhetorics of the barroom through a class lens, but the class lens is a little cloudy. Seems to understand class as primarily dependent on one’s occupation.
Mary Soliday, “Class Dismissed”: Excellent short piece on gatekeeping and how class affects the mission of composition and of the university in general.
Lynn Z. Bloom, “Freshman Composition as a Middle-Class Enterprise”: Makes me mad. Constructs such values as “temperance” and “cleanliness” as being those that set the middle class apart from other classes and then associates them with composition. Class bigotry.
Computers, composition, and class
Hawisher, LeBlanc, Moran, and Selfe, A History: Nice history of the field; shows the two discourses of efficiency and equity in the field.
Charles Moran, “Access: The A-Word in Technology Studies”: Excellent discussion of how the discourse of technology studiously ignores problems of material inequality; defines class entirely in terms of wealth. Moran’s other essays dealing with similar topics tend to use a similar definition.
C. Paul Olson, “Who Computes?”: The best essay ever written on class and computers in education. Does a sophisticated economic and cultural reading of how computers fit into schools as parts of relations of production and what they do for larger society. If you’re at all interested in the topic, you gotta read this essay.
Lots of good stuff on your list–and lots I don’t know. I would think top sociologists would have useful ways of producing operational definitions of “class”, but I’m a long way from that reading.
Sociolinguists like William Labov and Peter Trudgill have done very interesting studies for linguistic markers of class. Maybe you know that stuff and it doesn’t fit your focus, but compositon is a subset of the study of language, so I’d think it would be important.
There’s a book titled WorkTime by a prof out of u. of Washington (Evan Watkins, I think) that is an analysis of work generated in English departments, using a Marxist framework for analysis. I found the jargon infuriating, but he offers an interesting way of talking about all the “work” generated by an English department.
If you’ve read Gintis and Bowles, then you’ve probably seen some of that early stuff based on the “cooling out function” concept of community colleges. I still don’t seen how compositionists can address class in any form and not address institutional differences between universities and cc’s in class terms.
But I’m hardening my theory that the refusal to address community college composition in composition studies is a class issue that the Marxist types are blind to. Or don’t know how to deal with so they just ignore it.
Dick Ohmann and Bruce Horner, for instance, are very nice guys. But I don’t think they know anything about community colleges.
Thanks for this, Mike. Looks like an indispensible resource.
I’m a student at a city college in Chicago and I stumbled upon this blog while researching a paper for a social science class. The assignment was to descibe how I felt I fit into society, and what structure and what concept within culture I used to explain mt statement. It’s tentatively titled “Defining Class and ‘Serving the People'”. My teacher wants it in APA format , so the abstract goes like this– “This paper compares Marxist and non-Marxist definitions of class to see which correspond closest to this writer’s experience. It will build upon this to explain how social class and Marxism has informed this writer’s decision to become a teacher.” Could anyone suggest any readings I could use to define class from both a Marxist and a “bourgeois” perspective? I would really appreciate any help cuz I’m one of those people who waits ’till the last minute on these things. Thanx!
Eric, I’d start with Raymond Williams’ ten-page historical definition of the term, in his book Keywords: really good, insightful stuff there. After that, the first and final chapters of Gilbert and Kahl’s The American Class Structure give a good, broad (albeit not terribly deep) view of all the different ways people — mostly sociologists — see class, and all the factors they see contributing to our sense of class. (In the fifth edition, it’s just Gilbert.) Resnick and Wolff, in the first chapter of Knowledge and Class, give their postmodern Marxian take on class, which is quite different from the classical Marxist perspective — which you can get from Williams and from the section of the 18th Brumaire he points you to. And, of course, there’s the billboard version in The Communist Manifesto that most folks will be familiar with.
Love to see what you come up with, if you feel like sharing it after you’re finished.