Me

Martin Goodhead. Keele University.  Phd English:  ‘British Working Class Subjectivities within Literature Post 2008’

My research examines representations and presence of working-class subjectivities within contemporary British Literature (post 2000, and with particular reference to post-2008 Literature). Chapters include: Work and Capital; Creativity and Alternative Practices; History/Hauntology (after Fisher post-Gordon, as wellas Hitchcock) ; Depictions of the working-class within media and institutional forms, and reproductions/subversions of working-class personae; Places and psychogeographies.

It seeks to consider class as constituted by memories, positions, cultural sediments and economic transitions as well as partially permeable and fungible, thus taking in a variety of class-subjectivities around work, creativity, gender, ethnicity and political emancipation. The study explores ethics of representation (after Emmanuel Levinas, and Derek Attridge on literature’s ‘peculiar’ event, as well as Nicholas Royle’s ‘veering’) and accounts of agency within a broadly (post)post structuralist framework which seeks to fulfil David Punter’s claim for the ‘haunt’ as the ‘most material’ ways of seeing things within contemporary space. It looks to do so through an approach that fuses work on ‘difference’ and liminality with a cultural materialist framework to perceive class-subjects in relation to the spatialtemporal post-crash austerity environment – along with a perceived wider-crisis within neoliberalism- and discover new equivalents of Ian Haywood’s archetypical ‘working-class realism’ as well as Jameson’s ‘wavering’ in Antinomies of Realism (2015) . It also draws upon my earlier Masters-study readings of the grotesque and collectively subversive in the light of the liminal relationship between ‘haunting’ and ‘possession’ in spectral materiality and subjectivities. This study specifically engages with the most contemporary treatments of working-class literary subjectivity, including the post-Williamsian postcolonial frame of Sonali Perera (2014), Phil O’Brien;’s work on melancholia in deindustrialisation,  Nick Hubble on  gendered shame,  Nick Bentley on intersectional working-class identities and subcultures, and the anti-work autonomist literary subjectivities explored by Roberto del Valle Alcala (2016), among others.

Following sociological work done by Isobel Tyler, Beverley Skeggs and Lisa Mckenzie,  amongst others, my study examines representations around ‘respectability’, ‘revolt’ and abjection in relation to variants of autonomism, Rancierean anti-class names and notions of widespread cross-class precariaty, before finding corollaries within literature. It also draws upon Anoop Nayak, Vik Loveday and other sociological theorists of nostalgia and collective temporality in relation to the practice of memories –individual and communal- around working-classhood and those fantasies available within the community or idioculture.

Spatially, the study examines estates literature, ‘edgelands’ , villages and seasides as well as the urban through the work done around practices by Walkerdine and  Morgan, psychogeography by Tina Richardson in her schizocartographical accounts after Guattari and Doreen Massey’s Soja/Deleuze-inflected work on ‘place’, Christopher Collier on autonomist influenced psychogeographical practices and Kim Duff’s literary-studies accounts of post-Thatcherite textual spaces/places. It sees there new generated practices, those heralded by Fisher in response to  Capitalist Realism as excavations of the ’68 liberation of desire framed by a Marxist materialism as well as Benjamin’s constellations and Bloch’s ‘time to come’, Hatherley on militant modernism’s promises, and Plan C on Acid Politics.

COLLABORATIONS

I am keen to hear from anyone interested in collaborating, whether fellow English-Literature researchers or those outside of Literary Studies looking to engage in interdisciplinary work, especially around the areas of psychogeography, representations of the working-class in contemporary culture or relationships between institutions (social services, educational institutions, benefit agencies) and the working-class, as well as work around the creation of new spaces through art or emergent practices and the formation of new political imaginaries. I would also be interested in codeveloping university- community projects around place and working-class themed storytelling, place-writing and showcasing of community-work as well as activism.