“The New Deal”: Burkean Identification and Working-Class Poetics

Abstract

Working-class people perform class identities. These performances are marked with ironies in which working class symbolizes power and powerlessness. Such performances elide linear meaning-making in favor of poetic paradox and help us understand the contradictions of working-class life. The New Deal, a chapbook by my great-grandfather, represents an occasion for understanding how one working-class person used language to consider his life's contradictions. The chapbook articulates a unique “working-class poetics” and suggests why rhetoricians ought to locate representations of the paradoxes of working-class life.

Notes

¹Thanks to RR peer reviewers Clarke Rountree and Rick Coe and to Lew Caccia, Luisa Rodriguez, Tilly Warnock, and UMD's junior faculty reading group for helpful suggestions.

²One of my earliest memories is visiting Aunt Minnie at her home, eating vitamins at her insistence, and listening to stories of mysterious vans monitoring her home. She suspected the vans were sent to keep tabs on her after she made a donation to the Sandanistas.

³David K. Shipler's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Working Poor: Invisible in America reviews many of these factors.

⁴Drawing on Burke, Desser describes reading letters written by her great-grandfather, a Russian Zionist, and forging an “identification” with him as a Jew but a “nonidentification” with him as someone with a different perspective on nationalist ideologies—an example of language leading to the construction of a conflicted social bond.

⁵“In forming ideas of our personal identity, we spontaneously identify ourselves with family, nation, political or cultural cause, church, and so on” (Language as Symbolic Action 301).

⁶See Catano for analysis of the rhetoric of working-class masculinity.

⁷Foley provides a comprehensive and theoretically rich discussion of the question.

⁸A gathering of radical writers of the 1930s including Langston Hughes and Meridel LeSueur.

⁹Zinn critiques our tendency to turn to elite saviors during crises and suggests that the trend discourages civic action. On histories that validate Great Men, Zinn writes, “They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among saviors, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions” (631). I admire D. B.'s rejection of this mode of citizenship, even while disagreeing with his politics.

¹⁰See “The Poetic Process” in Counter-Statement.

¹¹Burke allows for the generative possibility of abstraction, too, rejecting “the proletarian attitude … that literature must be ‘useful’” (Counter-Statement 240). Burke does not define an extant body of utterances as class-conscious, instead revising the domain of poetics into a rhetoric. I am arguing that working-class texts illustrate this potentiality in particularly sharp relief.

¹²Burke gives as an example a shepherd who “identifies” with the role of lamb guardian but also takes part in slaughtering lambs (Language as Symbolic Action 301-02).

¹³“Fundamentally, then, the play exploits to the ends of dramatic entertainment, with corresponding catharsis, the tension intrinsic to a kind of social division, or divisiveness” (Language as Symbolic Action 88).

¹⁴Beech discusses the rhetoric(s) of terms like redneck and hillbilly, analyzing the race and class dimensions of such phrases in popular culture and classrooms. Beech's article was part of a “Social Class and English Studies” issue of College English, which warrants a close look by scholars interested in class.

DeGenaro, Marian. E-mail Interview. 14 October, 2005.