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Jobs with Justice Visits Working Class Literature Course

Nick Hengen Fox

In Working Class Literature (ENG 237), we read a range of texts that explore the experience of working people—poems, stories, novels, creative nonfiction. One of the threads that runs through many texts, by very different writers working at very different times, is a somewhat unique tension to art and class. If a working class writer wants to change the exploitative class system under capitalism, is making art enough?

In the middle of the term, this is dramatized by our reading of Tillie Olsen’s novel Yonnondio. Begun while Olsen was a new mother and an organizer with the communist party in the 1920s, the book was never completed. Other demands, both of life and political work, took over Olsen’s life for many decades. Ultimately, the unfinished book was published in the 1970s.

As we were finishing Yonnondio—thanks to the generous support of HARTS—we were able to have someone come from the world of organized labor to help us think more about the connections between labor and literature in a concrete way. Tyler Fellini, an organizer with the group Portland (and former С��è��ý student), helped us examine how unions are intimately tied into these questions—both then and now—and pointed us towards a new “popular front” forming that includes many working class artists today.

Jobs with Justice’s visit was generously funded by the С��è��ý HARTS Fund, which supports programming and scholarships that increases student access to the arts and humanities. To donate to the HARTS Fund, please go to the donation page and choose “Other” in the designation form. Then enter “HARTS” in the box that appears.