Sam's blog on Seguin

Stephen Ross's review on Robert Seguin's Around quitting time located at muse journals http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v048/48.2ross.html identifies Seguin's primary notion is that :

"we must adopt a dialectical perspective which analyzes class as a fluid process rather than a category with determinate content"

He identifies how a class labelled "middle-class" has become so broad that it both identifes everyone as belonging to this group of people therefore in effect removing all class systems. He additionally identifies two of his theories as "broad contentions"; one being the pastoral and the other being the frontier and the idea that the combination of the two concludes in a distictively middle class utopia of leisure. This basically means that by the American people percieving leisure as their Utopia they detatch themselves from work; work being labelled as one of the major signifiers of class.

Robert Seguin's study looks at the cultural context of the American middle-class during the modernist era; Seguin draws primarily from a Marxist and cultural understanding and study. The notion of middle-class is labelled as a fantasy one which is created by the reformulation of the past pastoral discourse that has ideological, material, and physical elements. The "updating or refunctioning" of such elements is what Seguin calls a middle-class space. This space suspends class itself, therefore creating "classlessness." In other words, there is no difference between being middle-class and being classless.

The article "the toil of labour" counters this arguement however depicting the view of the working man being a struggle, arduous and backbreaking. Work is something you do because you must but you loathe every minute of it, there is no reward other than the money which you need to survive, survival being the primary objective.