| Those who study class representation in literature, specifically working class, many times construct the prototypes and parameters of the study through a Marxist lens, which inevitably stereotypes working-class persons by attempting to create a homogenous subject. Because Marxism has become hegemonic within the discourse, a major and overarching problem is the unintentional control of the language of the study, the parameters of the study, and the sociopolitical thrust of the study by the tenets of this sociopolitical discourse. Through the performativity of this Marxist discourse, academia has closed the discourse to other language games that might construct people within "class" as individuals.;This dissertation attempts to expose and remedy the underlying reductionism, essentialism, and the stereotyping of the working class inherent in the parameters of the study as it now stands by those who attempt to define a corpus of literature and authors while accusing others of reductionism, essentialism, and stereotyping. This dissertation proposes to move beyond the totalizing Marxist prototype of class to the construction of a poststructuralist, postmodernist literary theory centered around a working class persona based on cognitive, sociological, prototype, agency, identity, and theories of narrativity.;A new prototype of "class" might be established that will enable a theory of the working class based on ideology as it concerns individual and communal identity, because class in America is not a group of like-fated people in the Marxist sense (if it ever was), but rather status groups based on the recognition and distribution of symbolic capital within a social field, which become signs of class. Class is reconstructed as a complex play of the signs of ideologies, narrativity, and agency based on prototypes in a constantly shifting social field. This theory of class contends that core ideologies are regenerated through in-group/out-group interaction and the habitus---ideology inherited from parents and social structures within social fields. Class, then, is a set of attributes of a core ideology judged against attributes of a different class or core ideology. I name these core ideologies "privileged" and "unprivileged" based on an over-all and differing world view. |
