231062 The Precarious: Contemporary British Working-Class Fiction and Film (S) (WiSe 2021/2022)

Ushering in the new millennium, then Prime Minister Tony Blair triumphantly asserted that “the class war is over for good”. In a country that had historically been riven by vast socio-economic inequalities and sharp class distinctions, Blair – after all the first Labour Prime Minister since 1979 – cemented an ideology of classlessness aimed at glossing over the disastrous repercussions of Margaret Thatcher’s slashing of Britain’s industrial landscape and unleashing of financial capitalism in the 1980s. This discursive “evasion of class” (Driscoll 2009) arguably did most harm to the former industrial working class, whose troubled transition into a new precariat of insecure, low-wage, low-recognition jobs in the post-industrial service sector it effectively rendered invisible.
We will examine this period of social, economic and cultural upheaval through the lens of contemporary, mainly 21st-century British working-class fiction and cinema and cast a keen eye to the changing intersections of class with gender, sexuality and race.

Bibliography

Please purchase as print editions (and read as much as you can manage before we start!) of Pat Barker’s Union Street (1982) and Zadie Smith’s NW (2012). Further material will be made available in class.