looked at me with shrewd eyes, as if I were a swindler. “Fifty pounds! An’ tha’s niver done a day’s hard work in thy life.”
The comment illustrates the difficulties of integrating writing into models of labor and value. Working-class authors have often struggled to represent writing as a productive practice and to secure positions for themselves within communities structured by the shared experience of recognized labor. The difficulties they experience raise important questions about writing, the value it generates, and its relation to other forms of work. This panel will explore the ways in which working-class writers represent the labor of writing. Examining neglected authors from three periods and countries, the papers consider distinct cultural and historical ideas about what qualifies as productive labor and their political implications.
The panel consists of three eighteen-minute papers. It begins with Blevin Shelnutt’s “George Foster’s Materialist Aesthetics and the Work of Art”, which uses Foster’s descriptions of his experience as a struggling journalist in New York by Gas-Light (1850) and New York Naked (1856) to explore the relationship between work and art. The paper draws on both materialist and aesthetic theory to argue that Forster understood literary production, not just as the manipulation of language, but as a form of physical labor. Challenging ideas of artistic autonomy that separate writing from industrial work, Foster uses his nocturnal toil as a sub-editor for one of New York’s biggest papers to draw attention to the literal labor of textual production, where the materiality of writing is registered less by the constitutive signs of language than the constitutive places, practices, and technologies of mass publishing. The session continues with Ben Clarke’s “‘A pre-Raphaelite brotherhood for the proletarian uglies’: Writing Labor and the Labor of Writing”, which focuses on the contributors to Jack Common’s Seven Shifts (1938), a collection of accounts of work and unemployment in Britain during the Depression. Making extensive use of archival sources, the paper analyses the ways in which these working-class authors, many of them publishing for the first time, attempted to reconcile the practice of writing with gendered ideas of legitimate labor. Focusing on Jack Hilton and Jack Common, it also considers their attempts to understand authorship as a profession, arguing that their concern with the act of writing and its renumeration challenges ideas of literary production as individual and autonomous, distinct from other forms of work. Their texts insist on writing as a social practice and a form of communal as well as individual labor. The final paper, Luka Lei Zhang’s “‘Break my gaze’: Writing about Labor as a Worker Poet” focuses on the little-known contemporary Chinese working-class literary journal, Worker Poetry. It argues that Worker Poetry is distinct from both the dagong literary community and new workers writing, in part because it does not depend on recognized intellectuals and is not interested in either media or academic exposure. The writers associated with the journal have deliberately remained “underground” and have sustained a radical working-class consciousness since the journal was established in the early 2000s. They are exemplified by the poet Shengzi (1968-), who has worked in a variety of different factories in the past thirty years and has written experimental poetry and organized online forums for working-class authors for the past twenty. As well as poems, he has published a series of short articles documenting his and his coworkers’ experience of labor. Most of his poems are directly related to his working experiences and articulate the critical perspective of the exploited working classes. The paper analyses Shengzi's work, focusing in particular on “Steel is the Place Where Life Ends”, a poem that uses the image of steel to depict the worker, reflect on the act of writing and the poet’s gaze, and invite further inquiry into the relations between writing and laboring.