Countering institutional silencing: the political agency of working class poetry in reconstructing Britain's social imaginary, 1984-present

我的研究兴趣在于我称之为“有组织遗忘”的概念，即主导意识形态机器对共享公共记忆的制造，以及文学在创造和维持这一过程中的作用。在研究重要的文化和政治事件的文学叙述时，我关心的是谁被允许说话，或者更确切地说，是谁被倾听。我感兴趣的是经典形成的问题，以及工人阶级的文学表现事件（特别是战后英国分水岭时刻）是如何产生和接受的。我的兴趣与吉洛里的调查文化资本：文学经典形成的问题（1993）和皮尔斯等人的后殖民曼彻斯特：散居空间和文学文化的权力下放（2013），以及他们考虑文学经典政治的方式广泛一致。因此，我的研究目标是探索主导话语和传统规范如何支配公众和集体对四个关键事件的记忆：1984年至1985年的英国矿工罢工；1989年希尔斯堡惨案；2011年伦敦骚乱；以及2017年格伦费尔大厦大火。使用Goodridge和Keegan对工人阶级写作的定义，即“由没有享受社会、经济和教育优势的个人创作的”，我认为这些作品可以作为分水岭时刻的破坏性历史（Goodridge和Keegan， 2017: 1）。这些文本反对并揭露了主流话语以及对事件的持续文化和文学混淆，而不是创造未经批准的描述，这些描述往往与公认的历史相矛盾。我的论文将特别关注工人阶级的诗歌——奥德丽·洛德（audre Lorde）认为“主人的工具永远不会拆除主人的房子”，这一观点在这里可以指出形式、语言的重新想象，以及诗歌“应该”是什么样子，作为以不同方式调解现实的必要策略（洛德，2017:89）。我扩展了诗歌的传统参数，将任何使用诗歌形式的东西都包括在内，无论多么松散，原因有几个：首先，它是最快的文学形式，允许作品几乎立即从它所讲述的事件中诞生。其次，诗歌的口述遗产，它与歌曲、吟唱和抗议的联系，以及它与说唱的当代联系，意味着诗歌形式在跨越几个世纪的工人阶级文化中具有固有的地位。我特别感兴趣的是，一种经常被小心翼翼地保护为“高雅文化”堡垒的形式，是如何被同化并重新用于政治目的的。

My research interests lie in a concept I term an 'organised forgetting', the manufacturing of a shared public memory by the dominant ideological apparatus, and literature's role in working to create and sustain this. In examining literary accounts of pivotal cultural and political events, my concern is with who is permitted to speak, or more pertinently, who is being heard. I am interested in issues of canon formation and how working class literary representations of events (particularly post-war British watershed moments) are both produced and received. My interests broadly align with both Guillory's investigative Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993) and Pearce et al's Postcolonial Manchester: Diaspora Space and the Devolution of Literary Culture (2013), and the ways in which they consider the politics of the literary canon. My research aim, then, is to explore how dominant discourses and a traditional canon govern what is publicly and collectively remembered of four pivotal events: the UK Miners' Strike, 1984-5; the Hillsborough Disaster, 1989; the 2011 London Riots; and the 2017Grenfell Tower fire. Using Goodridge and Keegan's definition of working class writing as that 'which is produced by individuals who have not enjoyed social, economic and educational advantages', I argue that these writings can function as disruptivehistories of watershed moments (Goodridge and Keegan, 2017: 1). These texts work against and expose dominant discourses and the ongoing cultural and literary obfuscation of events, instead creating unsanctioned accounts that oftencontradict received histories.My thesis will focus particularly on working class poetry -Audre Lorde's idea that 'the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house' can here point to the reimagining of form, language, and what poetry 'ought' to look like as necessary strategies with which to mediate reality differently (Lorde, 2017: 89). I expand the traditional parameters of poetry to encompass anything that uses poetic form, however loosely, for several reasons: firstly, it is the quickest literary form to produce, allowing work to be born almost immediately from the events it speaks of. Secondly, poetry's oral heritage, its ties to song, chant and protest, and its contemporary links to rap, mean the poetic form has an innate place within working class culture that spans centuries. I am particularly interested in the ways in which a form that is often carefully guarded as a bastion of 'high culture' can be co-opted and re-purposed to political ends.