Literature and Politics

Literature is more than art created for its own sake –– and it can reflect and shape our classed society. Marxist literary critics such as  Ruth Robbins (2000:33) argue that the ‘social forces’ that provide the background for the creation of literature must be acknowledged alongside the constraints faced by those not operating from class privileged backgrounds in getting their voices heard. In the dominant model, working-class texts are less likely to stand alone as iconic works of art – as art for art’s sake, because they are generally engaged with reality and the social forces that have created the conditions for their production.

Literature that engages with the everyday, or is committed to a political message or which explores the inequalities within society can be seen as a threat to the accepted canon of literature which emphasises the role of the individual artist’s interior world. But t is not possible to separate art and aesthetics from politics and society, and even those works of literature that claim to have transcended ideological considerations can be seen as having political implications as the writer is revealing the kind of class privilege that allows a distancing from the everyday. Literature is not created in a vacuum completely separate from society and therefore, ideology can not help but shape literature.

The link between poetry and politics can be observed clearly in poems that deal with the struggles of working class people. Poems about striking workers, unsafe work conditions, collective action and experiences with government institutions such as those by John Graham, Justine Williams, the 925 collective, Dennis McIntosh, Cathy Young and Bobbi Sykes  show how Australian working class writers have engaged with politics and reveal the kind of ‘committed’ literature that has been produced by working class writers throughout literary history.

Sarah Attfield has a PhD in Australian working class poetry from UTS. Her research interests include working class literature, working class culture in general and the ways in which working class people express themselves creatively. She is currently teaching in the cultural studies area at UTS. She is also a poet and is working on a second collection of poetry dealing with the lives of young working class women.