Literature on Class Letters

Go Ask the Time

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 10:49:46 +1000

Originally published at Granta

“I began with a story, I will end with story-telling”
— John Berger

Once there was a young man who said to himself: this story about everybody having to die, that’s not for me. I’m going to find a place where nobody ever dies. And so he says goodbye to his parents and his family, and he sets off on a journey. And after several months, he meets an old man, with a beard down to his chest, trundling rocks in a wheelbarrow off a mountainside. And he says to the old man: Do you know that place where nobody ever dies?

Violent Antagonisms: A conversation with Tobi Haslett

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 10:19:39 +1000

This interview was taken directly from The Point magazine.

In his work, Tobi Haslett chooses rough, unpredictable terrain over the well-trodden, direct path. Whether it comes to prose or ideas, he refuses to pander to the status quo, unlike many reviewers, who, he says, fall victim to its traps; and he insists on disclosing, especially at the formal level, how all cultural objects are “shot through with violent antagonisms.” Read his essays on Elizabeth Hardwick, or Susan Sontag, or the George Floyd rebellion, and you’ll see what I mean. Haslett is arguably one of the best, most culturally and socially incisive writers at work today, precisely because he is willing to dissent from what’s “trendy” and critique what’s “vulgar”—namely, what he calls “self-professed aesthetes.”

An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 01:58:15 +0000

In The Fall of 1974 I was walking one day from the English Department at the University of Massachusetts to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning such as encouraged friendliness to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously freshmen in their first flush of enthusiasm.An older man going the same way as I turned and remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a student too. I said, no, I was a teacher.What did I teach? African literature. Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who taught the same thing, or perhaps it was African history, in a certain community college not far from here. It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know. By this time I was walking much faster. “Oh well,” I heard him say finally, behind me: “I guess I have to take your course to find out.”

Studies in European Realism

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 02:07:16 +0000

The articles contained in this book were written some ten years ago. Author and reader may well ask why they should be republished just now. At first sight they might seem to lack all topicality. Subject and tone alike may appear remote to a considerable section of public opinion. I believe, however, that they have some topicality in that, without entering upon any detailed polemics, they represent a point of view in opposition to certain literary and philosophical trends still very much to the fore today. Let us begin with the general atmosphere: the clouds of mysticism which once surrounded the phenomena of literature with a poetic colour and warmth and created an intimate and ‘‘interesting’’ atmosphere around them, have been dispersed. Things now face us in a clear, sharp light which to many may seem cold and hard; a light shed on them by the teachings of Marx. Marxism searches for the material roots of each phenomenon, regards them in their historical connections and movement, ascertains the laws of such movement and demonstrates their development from root to flower, and in so doing lifts every phenomenon out of a merely emotional, irrational, mystic fog and brings it to the bright light of understanding.

Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 10:59:16 +0000

Due to the prolific number of footnotes that Michael’s article contains, the essay will simply be linked to here. It is an important walk through the trajectories that various essentialist concepts have taken in the course of modern Northern American history. What surprised me most was this quasi-progess — where it appears that the concept of race has been disposed of, it’s kernel is carried over into a different, yet sadly, familial form.

Soviet Literature

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 08:06:39 +0000

Herein is a speech delivered in August 1934, and published in 1935. It reappeared in Gorky, Radek, Bukharin, Zhdanov and others “Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934,” page 25-69, Lawrence & Wishart, 1977, and was transcribed by Jose Braz for the Marxists Internet Archive.

The role of the labour processes, which have converted a two-Legged animal into man and created the basic elements of culture, has never been investigated as deeply and thoroughly as it deserves. This is quite natural, for such research would not be in the interests of the exploiters of labour. The latter, who use the energy of the masses as a sort of raw material to be turned into money, could not, of course, enhance the value of this raw material. Ever since remote antiquity, when mankind was divided into slaves and slave-owners, they have used the vital power of the toiling mass in the same way as we today use the mechanical force of river currents. Primitive man has been depicted by the historians of culture as a philosophizing idealist and mystic, a creator of gods, a seeker after “the meaning of life.” Primitive man has been saddled with the mentality of a Jacob Böhme, a cobbler who lived at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century and who occupied himself between whiles with philosophy of a kind extremely popular among bourgeois mystics; Böhme preached that “Man should meditate on the Skies, on the Stars and the Elements, and on the Creatures which do proceed from them, and likewise on the Holy Angels, the Devil, Heaven and Hell."