A Moment of Abstraction: Education, Place, and Class in the Work of Tony Harrison

This paper utilises the work of Tony Harrison to consider the effect of social mobility on working-class masculinities. The work draws on Bourdieu to examine education and class, paying particular attention to the representation of the dislocation experienced by the working-class grammar school boy at the intersection of these two fields. The paper also explores the tension apparent in the intergenerational relationships represented within the texts, questioning the wider social significance of this interplay; as well as the latent connection to place (both social and geographic) and its relationship to language; and the re-affirmation of working-class identity from outwith the remit of the 'traditional' working-class. Ultimately the paper suggests that Harrison's engagement with class manifests as abstraction - which is understood here as a process of conceptualisation, but also as a state of pre-occupation and, equally, as a process of removal.