ABSTRACT
In a way, the spectrum from description to elaboration covers a range from a more factual, vernacular narration of the world to a more theoretical or reflexive view. Richard Hoggart has written autobiographically about this impulse, which he sees as the capacity to theorize his life and imagine it differently. He describes this as a phenomenon in relation to the class-based society in which he grew up:
Almost all working class people have been used to living as if subject to merely successive events. If the assault has a pattern it is that of birth and growth and death, it is that of seasons and main dates of the year and of the weekly wage packet. Working class life has long been dominated by the thisness of things and events and people; an unordered thisness.
What almost all working-class life – almost all levels of life – avoids or, better, is unaware of, is intellectual pattern-making, generalising across and about habits in space and time, and so of gathering such generalisations together and hazarding judgments […] To generalise about them is strange and can be disconcerting.
(Hoggart 1990: 213–214)