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The modern Scholarship Boy: betrayal or belonging?

Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy is a classic account of twentieth-century western culture which portrays the struggle of 1950s working class individuals to pursue higher positions in society through academia. Melissa Gregg, author of Cultural Studies' Affective Voices takes Hoggart's book as an illustration as how one's family and background can restrict upward mobility through binds of loyalty and values. Hoggart constructs an example of the student who transitions into academia from a working-class background through the figure of the Scholarship Boy, which Gregg takes as an illustration of the "unforgiving double bind" a student experiences; a tension between their working-class origins and higher education based on loyalty (43). I will argue, however, that Gregg's proposal of a "kind of betrayal" that "always haunt[s]" (43) the class-climbing student today ignores the currently shifting roles of the family and......

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Approximate Word Count: 2486
Approximate Pages: 10 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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