Evaluate the contribution of Richard Hoggart to the analysis of popular culture through an analysis of The Uses of Literacy in Society.
Richard Hoggart has been one of the leading cultural commentators of the last sixty years. He was the first literary critic to take the working class seriously and to extend the parameters of literary criticism to include popular culture. Hoggart put the working class on the cultural map. He differentiated between what was offered by the “popular providers” (media, popular fiction, advertisements) and the resilient culture of working-class people themselves. Richard Hoggart’s ‘The Uses of Literacy’ was published in 1957 and was an intellectual response to the challenge of mass media, becoming a renowned best seller. It set the outline for a generation’s instructive and punitive transformation. The book was not only an attempt to understand the changes in culture in Britain, but he hoped to define ‘massification’. Initially planned to be a guide to aspects of popular culture, the book is set in two halves. The first explores the working class – their customs, attitudes and relations – and is almost autobiographical as it focuses on Hoggart’s working-class upbringing in the 1920s and 30s. His second half of the book seeks to be the essential guide to many different aspects of culture, and now he has sought where culture can be located, he can make the definition. Hoggart’s main argument focuses around the idea that society is “moving towards the creation of mass culture [and that] the remnants of what was at least part an urban culture ‘of the people’ are being destroyed”.
Since the 1950s, communications and entertainment medias have grown significantly and hold unparalleled power over society. Not only has the media been at the front of technology advances, consumerism, development in information and globalization, but for Hoggart, the media is an integral part of connecting people with democratic parts of society –...