A Place to Stand

Thanks to Julie Lindquist for visiting my 'Rhetorics of Social Class' course on Wednesday. We discussed her important ethnography, A Place to Stand, and Julie generously spoke with grad students about the book's logistics, methods, and analyses as well as the emotional committment involved in doing the project. For those unfamiliar with her work, Lindquist studied the argumentative strategies of patrons of the working-class bar in suburban Chicago where she worked.

One of the things we talked about during her visit was her claim that 'argument' became the patrons' way to define rhetorically their own class identity. While patrons didn't utilize economic or "meta" jargon to talk about or identify their sociopolitical identity, they DID take part in political argument as a means to construct who they are and who they are not, using Lindquist (their bartender) as their "foil." Uniting around their shared (and usually friendly) opposition to her "liberal" positions on current events, the patrons used debate as their articulation of class position.

We connected this analysis to what Basil Bernstein and other sociolinguists say about working-class discourse--that working people often use qualified speech, hedging their statements with narrative ("this is just me, but...") and anecdote ("well, in my experience...") whereas middle-class and/or priveleged discourse is more willing to universalize and make blanket statements. Lindquist's ethnography, in my reading, disrupts Bernstein's schema in many ways. She finds that her working-class bar-goers are less rooted in storytelling and more rooted in deliberative rhetoric.

This and other connections grew from Wednesday's class. Thanks to Julie for making the drive to Oxford!