Lower-class Life Research Articles

Upward mobility, betrayal, and the Black Papers on education

Upward mobility, betrayal, and the Black Papers on education

PERUBAHAN KEHIDUPAN SOSIAL DALAM NOVEL DAUN YANG JATUH TAK PERNAH MEMBENCI ANGIN KARYA TERE LIYE

Tujuan penulisan ini untuk mengungkap perubahan kehidupan sosial berupa perubahan indetitas kehidupan kelas bawah yang diungkapkan dalam novel remaja Daun yang Jatuh Tak Pernah Membenci Angin. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah deskripstif kualitatif yang dilakukan dengan memaparkan secara mendalam perubahan indetitas sosial berupa perubahan sosial kehidupan kelas bawah yang terdapat dalam novel tersebut. Di samping metode deskriptif kualitatif, juga disandingkan pendekatan sosiologi sastra yang mengacu pada mobilitas sosial. Mobilitas sosial adalah suatu gerakan yang dilakukan dengan cara bagaimana seseorang melakukan upaya sosial agar kehidupannya menjadi lebih baik lagi. Melalui gerakan ini, ada upaya perubahan kehidupan, setidaknya menjadi lebih baik. Pengambilan data dilakukan melalui kepustakaan, yaitu dengan teknik simak dan catat isi novel yang menggambarkan masalah penelitian. Dari hasil penelitian diperoleh gambaran bahwa novel Daun yang Jatuh Tak Pernah Membenci Angin mengungkapkan perubahan kehidupan tokoh Tania yang awalnya berasal dari kelas bawah berhasil hidup meningkat menjadi kelas lebih tinggi karena ketekunan dan kesungguhan berusaha, juga karena kepedulian masyarakat di sekitarnya, yaitu kepedulian tokoh Danar.

Humanism in Mulk Raj Anand's novels

Anand is called a champion of the down-trodden He is the first novelist writing in English to choose as his raw material from the lower class life of the Indian masses. He presents a realistic picture of Indian society in his novels. In the choice of themes, he is unquestionably an innovator. He has felt the pulse of Indian society He goes deep into the hearts of the poor and the down-trodden. He selects the lowest classes and the labouring classes to represent them in his novels. He pleads for the oppressed and exploited people in society. He has always felt that the less-privileged populations in a country like India has been deliberately kept at a level of sub-humanity. Anand's preoccupation with contemporary issues and his faith in humanistic ideals are best reflected in the course of the narrative of his novels. The problems that generally engage him in his novels are the exploitation of the poor, social discrimination based on race relations etc. As he is a humanist by conviction. He tries to project the problems, conflicts and aspirations of the underdog in Indian society in a compassionate manner.

Modernist Life Writing and Nonhuman Lives: Ecologies of Experience in Virginia Woolf’s Flush

Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933) takes its place alongside Orlando as a key modernist experiment with the norms and conventions of life writing. Flush is what might be described as a metabiographical text, probing the consequences for life writing, revealing it to be an inextricable entanglement not just of male, female, upper-, and lower-class life histories, but also of human and nonhuman ways of encountering the world. Furthermore, in modeling nonhuman phenomenology, Flush suggests how coming to terms with stories about nonhuman lives calls for a new, “transdisciplinary” paradigm for narrative inquiry.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First-person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750-1900

Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First-person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750-1900

The Place of a Servant in the Scale

Abstract This essay examines the servants and shopkeepers who play a surprisingly central yet critically unacknowledged role in Henry James's fiction of the late 1890s, arguing that James's frequent depiction of lower-class life is a sign not of an unsuspected interest in class but of his familiar interest in consciousness. This interest has been memorably diagnosed by Sharon Cameron, who observes that in the work of James's last stage “consciousness is not in persons; it is rather between them”—that thoughts can be shared by characters without being spoken. Yet the writings that immediately precede James's last works offer a less reciprocal model of consciousness to the one that Cameron provides. Because the characters in What Maisie Knew (1897), The Awkward Age (1899), and The Turn of the Screw (1898) do not have access to the minds of those around them, they are forced to imagine other forms in which to measure both their own knowledge and that of others. The form they discover is the lives of the people who work for them. These subjects provide a fixed scale by which to measure the growth of consciousness in James's protagonists because they are assumed to have none of their own. Thus in The Turn of the Screw the terror experienced by the governess at the apparition of the ghosts of the former governess and valet can be understood as her realization that her identity is her situation; like them, she is reproducible, exchangeable, dispensable. The ghosts, that is, function as externalized figures for her own condition.

Undercover Explorations of the "Other Half," or the Writer as Class Transvestite

ON A RAINY WINTER NIGHT, in depression year of 1894, Stephen Crane went forth dressed in rags and tatters ... to try to eat as tramp may eat, and sleep as wanderers sleep. His experiences in Bowery that night provided basis for sketch 'An Experiment in Misery, which confronted readers of NePw York Press with an unusual journalistic message: Much of what they thought they knew about lower-class life was invalid. You can tell nothing of it unless you are in that condition yourself, he wrote, It is idle to speculate about it from ... [a] distance.2 The sketch's fictionalized account of one middle-class youth's disguised journey into lower classes attempts to bridge this distance, providing Crane's readers with study of class subjectivity in transformation. For what Crane wishes to show is not other half lives but how misery, as class-specific social force, shapes perception. Working toward this end, he carefully depicts youth's representative change through gradual movement into lower-class social body. Walking along streets dressed in an aged suit (862), youth is completely plastered with yells of 'bum' and 'hobo,' and cast into a state of profound dejection (283). Later, in lodging house, he feels alteration deepen as his liver turn[s] white from unspeakable odors that assail him like malignant diseases with wings (287). This misery does produce desired sociological reward: During long night, youth stays awake watching the forms of men ... lying in death-like silence or heaving and snoring with

Servants, Shophands, and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan

In this analysis of lower-class life in Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868), the author portrays the emergence of an urban proletariat during a time of extraordinary economic change. With the rapid increase in urban construction and commercial activity, hired labourers came to replace the traditional workers, while in households, contracted servants supplanted hereditary workers. The text demonstrates that in the same way that products previously restricted to use by the elite became commodities for mass consumption, labour power itself became a commodity: class relations were gradually mediated by money, and employers and employees dealt with each other on increasingly impersonal, if not hostile, terms. Attempting to control such trends, government officials regulated workers by fixing employment seasons, limiting job tenures, setting wages, and establishing labour exchanges, licensing systems and workhouses. The author points out many cases in which Tokugawa policies toward labour resembled those applied by early modern regimes in Europe. Based on population registers, household records, legal documents and popular literature, the book offers a social history of workers and employers alike.

Convict Runaways in Maryland, 1745–1775

That the newspaper press in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake colonies was chock-full of advertisements for runaway convicts is a clear indication of the significance of transportation to America in that period. The existence of convicts in Virginia and Maryland stemmed from the provisions of the Transportation Act passed by the British parliament in 1718. This stated that felons found guilty of non-capital crimes against property could be transported to America for seven years while the smaller number of criminals convicted on capital charges could have their death sentence commuted to banishment for either fourteen years or life. Between 1718 and 1775, when the traffic ended with the approach of war, more than 90 percent of the 50,000 convicts shipped across the Atlantic from the British Isles were sold by contractors to settlers in the Chesapeake, where there was a continuous demand for cheap, white, bonded labour. Though many convicts were people who had resorted to petty, theft in hard times rather than habitual criminals, they were often viewed with jaundiced eyes in the Chesapeake as purveyors of crime, disease and corruption. They also had to endure, along with slaves and indentured servants, the everyday reality of lower-class life in colonial America: the exploitation of unfree labour. It is therefore not surprising that many convicts, like other dependent labourers, tried to free themselves from bondage by escaping from their owners.

Albert Cossery and the men god forgot: Some aspects of the ethnic subcultures of Egyptian society

This article discusses the work and personal experience of the exile, Egyptian novelist and short story writer, Albert Cossery. Selections of his prose which revealingly portray lower class life in Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century are considered, granting us a candid view of life as lived by the masses of Egyptians during this period. Also investigated is Cossery's personal development as an Egyptian Greek Catholic intellectual whose education and cultural inclination predisposed him to write in French. His life is of particular interest because it mirrors some typical dilemmas faced by minority intellectuals during the transformation of a developing nation from foreign rule to national independence.

The criminal statistics of nineteenth-century cities: a new approach

In the last decade an area of urban history receiving increasing attention has been that of crime and, in particular, nineteenth-century crime. For those social scientists whose main interest is the study of lower-class life the study of crime has become increasingly fashionable. However, the study of crime is the study of the whole of society and the relationship of the various classes within that society. That law-makers create law-breakers is axiomatic and the study of crime is, therefore, not just the study of criminals but also of the institutions which defined them as criminals. For too long it has been implied that studying criminals is the study of a subset of lower-class life. This is a reflection of the fact that research is largely a middle-class occupation and so researchers bring to their work their own middle-class perception of society. The result is the automatic acceptance that crime consists purely of larceny, burglary, assault, rape and murder while overlooking the middle-class crimes of fraud, embezzlement, tax evasion, offences against the Companies Acts, Consumer Protection Acts and Factory Acts.

Black Male-Black Female Conflict

Who is to blame? Currently, there is no dearth of attention directed to Black male-Black female relationships. Books, magazine articles, academic journal articles, public forums, radio programs, television shows, and everyday conversations have been devoted to Black male-Black female relationships for several years. Despite the fact that the topic has been discussed over the past several decades by some authors (e.g., Frazier, 1939; Drake and Cayton, 1945; Grier and Cobb, 1968), Wallace's Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman has been the point of departure for many contemporary discussions of the topic since its publication in 1979. Actually, Wallace's analysis was not so different in content from other analyses of Black male-Black female relationships (e.g., Drake and Cayton's analysis of lower-class life in Black Metropolis). But Wallace's analysis was timely. Coming so soon on the heels of the Black movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and, at a time when many Black male-inspired gains for Blacks were disappearing rapidly, the book was explosive. Its theme, too, was provocative. Instead of repeating

Class, perceptions of 'disordered' behaviour, and suggestions for therapy: a tri-cultural comparison.

This paper presents findings from a tri-cultural study in which we argue that class differences pertain not only to rates of mental illness but also to recognition of symptoms of mental illness and to recommendations concerning what should be done by those exhibiting 'disordered behaviour'. It is hypothesized that regardless of respondent's cultural background, the extent to which a deviant behaviour will be defined as a mental health problem, and professional therapy will be suggested as a source of help for that problem, will be positively related to class. Findings from a sample selected from two small West Texas communities, and samples selected from Durango, Mexico, and Juiz de Fora, Brazil, indicate strong support for the first prediction only among the West Texas sample, whereas the second hypothesis concerning therapy suggestions is strongly supported among respondents in all three cultural settings. We conclude that these class differences in perceptions and suggestions concerning five examples of 'disordered' behaviours read to respondents relate to conditions of lower-class life in general. Particularly, structural support found for our hypothesis leads us to suggest a need for informal, nonbureaucratic mental health care systems created to serve lower-class populations residing in class-oriented societies, regardless of cultural differences which may exist among these societies.

The Jews of Georgian England, 1714-1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society

movement from tradition to modernity engulfed all of the Jewish communities in the West, but hitherto historians have concentrated on the intellectual revolution in Germany by Moses Mendelssohn in the second half of the eighteenth century as the decisive event in the origins of Jewish modernity. In The Jews of Georgian England, Todd M. Endelman challenges the Germanocentric orientation of the bulk of modern Jewish historiography and argues that the modernization of European Jewry encompassed far more than an intellectual revolution.His study recounts the rise of the Anglo-Jewish elite--great commercial and financial magnates such as the Goldsmids, the Franks, Samson Gideon, and Joseph Salvador--who rapidly adopted the gentlemanly style of life of the landed class and adjusted their religious practices to harmonize with the standards of upper-class Englishmen. Similarly, the Jewish poor--peddlers, hawkers, and old-clothes men--took easily to many patterns of lower-class life, including crime, street violence, sexual promiscuity, and coarse entertainment.An impressive marshaling of fact and analysis, The Jews of Georgian England serves to illuminate a significant aspect of the Jewish passage to modernity.Contributes to English as well as Jewish history. Every reader will learn something new about the statistics, setting or mores of Jewish life in the eighteenth century. . --American Historical ReviewTodd M. Endelman is William Haber Professor of Modern Jewish History, University of Michigan. He is also the author of Comparing Jewish Societies, Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World, and Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656-1945.

The Religion of the Poor: Escape or Creative Force?

This study presents an alternative explanation of low-income religious behavior other than as a compensation for the conditions of lower-class life or as an escape from those conditions. The argument is made that the religion of the poor contributes in significant and positive ways to the processes of identity formation and to the development and maintenance of cultural values and norms. The immediate social environment of the religious service provides a context in which identities are dynamically and dramatically conferred, developed, and reinforced. With regards to the larger social evnrionment, the religion of the poor, first of all, offers a challenge to the hierarchical structure of the general status system. And, secondly, the religion of the poor offers an understanding of tragedy and suffering that is frequently lacking from the sensibilities of the religious nonpoor.

Book Review: The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790–1940

Book Review: The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790–1940

Self-Reported Delinquency: A Comparison of Structured Interviews and Self-Administered Checklists

A critical issue in the study of deviant behavior is the operational definition of the dependent variable. Such definitions are central not only to the process of measuring deviant phenomena, but also to the process of assigning meaning to data. The implications of this issue have been clearly drawn for the study of juvenile delinquency by Hirschi and Selvin who note that one defines delinquency determines in large part how one will explain ' While a variety of empirical referents2 have been employed in operational definitions, the major source of discussion and controversy has been the distinction between official and self-report indices of delinquency. Early studies employed operational definitions of delinquency that were coextensive with the availability of official data for arrests or court appearances among juveniles.3 These and similar studies frequently reported inverse relationships between social class and juvenile delinquency which prompted theorists to explicate the conditions of lower-class life that dis-

Sectarianism, World View, and Anomie

Sectarianism, World View, and Anomie

Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum.

Black lower class life in the United States is revealed in a study based on case studies of specific families living in a federal housing project.

PHYSICAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN

One of the basic obstacles to the development of effective countermeasures against accidental injury is the fact that the intensity of public concern over a particular type of injury-producing episode bears little relationship to its prevalence or to the seriousness of its consequences. An aircraft accident that takes 40 lives receives national attention through the mass media, whereas the fact that 150 persons died on the highways on the same day (and on every subsequent day) goes virtually unnoticed. The entrapment of a handful of children in discarded refrigerators has produced major changes in federal, state, and local laws; the death and injury of fifty times that number from accidental gunshot wounds has failed to produce even minimally effective legislation for the regulation of firearms. The "box office" appeal of various types of accident would make an interesting study; certainly in the absence of some knowledge of this phenomenon the cost-effectiveness principle is almost impossible to apply to accident counter-measures. The following paper deals very productively with this problem. For a number of years the "abused" or "battered" child has elicited very strong concern on the part of professionals in law, medicine, social work, and child care. And one consequence of this concern has been the establishment of legislative machinery and a reporting system. Good epidemiological research reveals, however, that child abuse, despite the intense response that it has aroused, has, in fact, relatively low prevalence and that, by implication, the funds and manpower that it now absorbs more appropriately be devoted to a more signfficant cause of childhood injury. Unfortunately, legislative and administrative routines, once established, tend to perpetuate themselves. It will be interesting to note whether, in the light of the epidemiological findings, the reporting requirements will be withdrawn. Another major contribution of this paper is its attribution of child abuse to the social rather than the psychological characteristics of the parents. Although the past decade has witnessed an increasing concern with poverty and the poor, virtually no attention has been devoted to the differential vulnerability to accidental injury of children in various socioeconomic levels ard subcultural groups. Our increased understanding of cultural deprivation and of lower-class life style gives us ample material for speculation about this differential, but such speculation is hazardous, and systematic empirical research must be undertaken. Meanwhile the present paper and the one by Kravitz and Driessen offer us useful guidelines.