The ‘Scholarship Boy’: Autobiographical Narratives of Social Mobility

Abstract

This article examines the social figure of the ‘scholarship boy’, an individual from a working-class background who gains access to elite education through government assistance, as depicted in autobiographical narratives of upward social mobility. Analysing the psychological costs and affective impact of this upward mobility, the article explores Richard Rodriguez’s autobiographical narrative Hunger of Memory. Through this analysis, the article aims to deepen our understanding of the complex relationship between education, social mobility, and identity formation embedded in autobiographical narratives of upward social mobility centred around the social figure of the ‘scholarship boy’.

Introduction

This article discusses the intriguing concept of the ‘scholarship boy’, a term first introduced by Richard Hoggart in his influential work The Uses of Literacy. Though rooted in the English educational system, the scholarship boy phenomenon transcends cultural boundaries, finding resonance in countries like Germany, France and the United States. This article focuses specifically on the American experience, drawing upon French and German theoretical perspectives to provide a nuanced understanding of the social figure of the ‘scholarship boy’. The scholarship boy, or girl, represents an individual from a working-class or economically marginalized background who, through government-funded assistance, gains access to an elite education typically enjoyed by the privileged. This upward mobility, however, often comes at a psychological cost. This article aims to analyze these costs, particularly as they manifest in the autobiographical narrative of Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (1982). ¹

Rodriguez’s work exemplifies the genre of autobiographical narratives of upward social mobility. This genre is often characterized by three distinct features. First, it establishes an ‘autobiographical pact’ between writer and reader, wherein a shared understanding of the narrative’s truthfulness is formed, based on the presumed alignment of author, narrator, and protagonist. There seems to be a minimum promise of authenticity, according to which the author can vouch for the events related in the autobiographical narrative with his own experience.

Second, it explores the transformative effects of educational advancement on the individual’s life, including the challenges of navigating social class transitions and the potential for a sense of alienation from one’s origins. For instance, the protagonist may have to distance himself from the milieu in which he grew up or otherwise change markedly for the sake of upward social mobility. This in turn is linked to specific personal affect dynamics – negative feelings associated with social mobility such as fear, powerlessness, shame, anger, etc. – which the autobiographical representation is capable of depicting from the subjective ‘interior’ perspective. The course of a character’s individual social life is often structured in a literary and narrative form (e.g. idyll, elegy) that may itself be politically charged.

Finally, it highlights the interplay between the author’s individual experiences and their role as a representative figure for others with similar backgrounds. Authors often claim that what is personal to the protagonist stands for something ‘greater’ in political or social terms, with a character’s individual fate thereby reproducing a more general social figuration – although in terms of an aesthetics of reception, readers usually encounter some scope for choosing to focus on the singular or the general. Where the reception of autobiographical narratives of upward social mobility is concerned, there often appears to be an element of solidarity formed in the process of reading, the emergence of a close and strong affective bond between the reader and the protagonist, with the narrative inviting identificatory and therapeutic forms of reading – to the point of anagnorisis in recognizing one’s fate in the protagonist’s.

My analysis will focus on the formal dimensions and cultural functions of this kind of autobiographical writing, drawing on existing scholarship and examining Rodriguez’s retrospective recognition of his own life as embodying Hoggart’s scholarship boy archetype. Rodriguez poignantly illustrates the internal conflict inherent in this experience, marked by a simultaneous sense of shame towards his parents’ lack of education and guilt for harboring such shame. The article further explores the lasting impact of this early conflict, evident in the child’s shame and the adult’s subsequent shame for the child’s shame, in the will to become universal, and the resulting drastic distancing from one’s social background. By examining the scholarship boy narrative through the lens of autobiographical writing, this article seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between upward social mobility, education, and the affective dimensions of identity formation.

It should be added that the article also examines the gendered dimensions of Hoggart’s ‘scholarship boy’ figure through Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, while recognizing that this focus on masculine educational mobility necessarily excludes consideration of female experiences of social advancement. Scholarship on the ‘scholarship girl’, most notably Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (Steedman, 1986), has demonstrated that women’s trajectories of class transition involve distinctive psychological dynamics, familial negotiations, and social expectations that problematize any universal application of Hoggart’s male-centered archetype. Rodriguez’s particular appropriation of the scholarship boy figure represents, furthermore, a specifically racialized variant of educational mobility in which questions of ethnic assimilation and linguistic identity intersect with class advancement in ways that distinguish his narrative both from the experiences of white scholarship boys and from the predominantly class-focused analytical frameworks that characterize much contemporary European autobiographical writing.

Although this article centers on Rodriguez’s individual appropriation of Hoggart’s scholarship boy figure, it is essential to position this analysis within recent scholarly frameworks that have conceptualized autobiographical narratives of class mobility as a ‘travelling form’ that has achieved particular prominence in Francophone and Germanophone literary contexts through the works of Annie Ernaux, Didier Eribon, Édouard Louis, and others (Twellmann and Lammers, 2023; see also Bundschuh-van Duikeren et al., 2025; Cadieu, 2024). Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, published in 1982, both anticipates and diverges from this recent wave of what has come to be termed ‘autosociobiography’ in significant ways. Where contemporary European ‘autosociobiography’ typically preserves some connection to collective class consciousness and political solidarity, Rodriguez’s autobiographical narrative privileges individual assimilation while systematically rejecting group-based identity categories. His opposition to bilingual education and affirmative action policies reflects distinctively American concerns with immigration and ethnic integration that find little parallel in the European tradition, indicating that the scholarship boy figure undergoes substantial transformation as it crosses not merely national boundaries but also ethnic and cultural divides. The article shows that the radical opposition Rodriguez constructs between ‘private’ ethnic particularity and ‘public’ American universality represents a historically specific configuration of educational mobility that differs markedly from both its British origins and its contemporary European manifestations.

The Social Figure of the Scholarship Boy

From the traits listed above, each of which merits further discussion in its own right, I would like first of all to pick up on that of social figuration. Autobiographical representations of social mobility often feature protagonists who are meant to represent not only an individual and idiosyncratic destiny but a more general set of social problems – specifically, those facing people who have risen to a higher social class through education, the type of the transclass person, and the phenomenon of social mobility in general. ² This phenomenon is personified with recourse to the protagonist of autobiographical narratives of upward social mobility.

The functioning of social figures has so far been explored above all in methodological reflections on the assumptions underpinning social theory. Social figures may be relatively abstract and formal (e.g. the employee in Siegfried Kracauer’s sociology) or relatively concrete and substantial (e.g. Rico in Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character) (Schlechtriemen, 2019: 153–8). We owe the most advanced description of the use of social figures in sociological theory to Tobias Schlechtriemen (Moser and Schlechtriemen, 2018; Schlechtriemen, 2019), who stresses the following traits: The social figure is a figure endowed with a certain three-dimensionality – having, for instance, a name, an age, a sex and a life story. This figure consistently appears in figural constellations, linked to other diachronic or synchronic figures. It is not constructed in sociological terms but is already current in the social world and articulates the current concerns of particular groups within society. It is not a hypostasised anthropological entity but rather displays a clear historical frame of reference (Schlechtriemen, 2019: 158–61). But Schlechtriemen does not stop at characterizing the sociological application of social figures. He also discusses the epistemic function of the social figure in the social sciences: since social figures contain current societal experience in condensed form, they also act as indicators of current social problems. By referring to these figures, sociology may also be able to expand its repertoire of representation, as it is now possible for the ‘phenomenological’ and life-world-related qualities of social problems to be more vividly depicted. Moreover, the figure allows for the forging of a close affective bond with the reader of sociological texts, thereby increasing not only the three-dimensionality but also the plausibility of sociological texts for a non-specialist audience (Schlechtriemen, 2019: 162–5).

A highly influential figure in the context of autobiographical narratives of upward social mobility was that of the ‘scholarship boy’ as developed by Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy, one of the founding texts of British cultural studies (Hoggart, 2009 [1957]). This figure displays all the traits cited by Schlechtriemen. The figure of the scholarship boy is an anthropomorphic one equipped with certain typical traits: he is a young working-class male who achieves social mobility by virtue of his academic achievements, but who in the process becomes alienated from the working class without ever fully feeling at home in the middle class. ³ In Hoggart’s account, the scholarship boy succeeds in breaking loose from the class of his origin, but not in establishing himself as a member of another (Hoggart, 2009 [1957]: 274). His distinctive trait therefore consists in his social displacement, in ‘a sense of no longer really belonging to any group’ (Hoggart, 2009 [1957]: 263). Even as a boy, he finds himself torn between two discrete environments: ‘such a boy is between two worlds of school and home’ (Hoggart, 2009 [1957]: 267). There is no mediating instance between the father’s domestic authority and that wielded at school by his teacher, who often assumes a paternal role in his own right (Hoggart, 2009 [1957]: 267). Between these forces, Hoggart concludes, the boy is profoundly ‘divided’ (Hoggart, 2009 [1957]: 272).

It is as such a divided character that the scholarship boy was adopted by German sociology (Dahrendorf, 1965b: 131–2). ⁴ He had, as Ralf Dahrendorf explained some years after Hoggart, ‘by virtue of his achievement worked his way up from working-class boy to academic’ (Dahrendorf, 1965b: 131). To accomplish this, he had had to leave his native region, his family and his religious community, in all of which he had felt ‘at home like a fish in water’. Yet for all his academic success he found himself unable to grasp ‘the meaningless niceties of an elevated social existence’ (Dahrendorf, 1965b: 132), a failure which left him ‘a sad and inwardly torn figure’ (Dahrendorf, 1965b: 131). The figure of the scholarship boy also had a considerable impact within French sociology. ⁵

Moreover, Hoggart’s scholarship boy is a figure within a broader constellation of ‘allegorical figures’ (Hoggart, 2009 [1957]: 255) that are designed to encapsulate the life-worlds associated with particular social situations and which, as Hoggart freely admits, display marked parallels with figures found in contemporary literature (Hoggart, 2009 [1957]: 260). As for the scholarship boy, the figure is not of Hoggart’s making but rather imported from the social world – or, to be more precise, from literary depictions of the social world. For it is striking how Hoggart uses literary examples to sketch the social figure, which owes its three-dimensionality to Hoggart’s reading of George Eliot, Graham Greene, Anton Checkhov, Ivan Turgenev and Virginia Woolf. As Hoggart explains, the scholarship boy ‘is Charles Tansley in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, but is probably without such good brains’ (Hoggart, 2009 [1957]: 273). Even in Hoggart, we thus already encounter the scholarship boy as a ‘literary figure’ (Dahrendorf, 1965b: 131). In addition, the scholarship boy is indicative of a set of social problems which, at the time The Uses of Literacy was published, had a clear contemporary index: here was a group of people who, though enabled to move to a higher social class by welfare-state interventions, do not quite manage to complete the transition, instead remaining stuck in a social no-man’s-land between the working and the middle classes. In those affected, this precarious position breeds a negative attitude towards both society and the self – something for which Hoggart, condescendingly describing the fate of the scholarship boy as that of a ‘blinkered pony’ or a ‘circus-horse’, shows little sympathy (Hoggart, 2009 [1957]: 268–9). ⁶

In this sketch Hoggart, himself a former scholarship boy, can be seen pursuing an ambivalent form of autobiographical reflection. ⁷ His social figure, saturated in literature and life-world alike and transposed into the realm of the social sciences, deeply affected many readers. In his autobiography, Hoggart notes how none of his writings had achieved such a resonance as the chapter on the scholarship boy in The Uses of Literacy. ⁸ And indeed his account of the ultimately pitiable fate of the scholarship boy, and particularly its vivid depiction of ambivalent states of mind, found many readers who strongly identified themselves with this allegorical figure. ⁹ One of these readers was Richard Rodriguez, an American literary scholar and public intellectual. His reading will be discussed in the following section.

Narratives of Identification

At the centre of Richard Rodriguez’s autobiography stands a reading scene at the British Museum. ¹⁰ A graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, working on English Renaissance literature, an alumnus of Stanford and Columbia universities now doing research at the Warburg Institute in London, is sitting in the reading room of the British Museum. Browsing through a book, a passage grabs his attention. Suddenly absorbed in the book, he recognizes his personal destiny in its descriptions: ‘I found [. . .] myself’. The book that facilitated this unexpected anagnorisis was Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy:

one day, leafing through Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, I found, in his description of the scholarship boy, myself. For the first time I realized that there were other students like me, and so I was able to frame the meaning of my academic success, its consequent price – the loss. (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 48)

The social figure of the scholarship boy permits Rodriguez to give a form to the entirety of his career to date. What were previously the disconnected events and experiences of his life can now be fitted into an all-encompassing frame, including his ambivalent relationship with his parents and teachers, his complicated attitude to reading and education, and the close link between a sense of alienation and the urge to remember.

Rodriguez proceeds to reformulate his own biography following the markers set by Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy: his constant movement between home and school, between parents and teachers (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 48), or the fact that his parents lose their authority as his education progresses (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 51) and he is no longer able to admire them (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 51). Instead, teachers not only become figures of respect and admiration (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 52) but are idolized and imitated (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 52). As a schoolboy, Rodriguez feels both embarrassment at his parents’ lack of education and guilt at his embarrassment (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 56). Rodriguez also recognizes himself in Hoggart’s depiction of the scholarship boy as a reader of books. His parents read only when they had to: ‘Never did I see either of them read an entire book’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 62). Constant reading is an activity that separates the child from his family even at home. It is an interest not shared, and absorbed reading moreover implies cutting oneself off from the rest of the family and its leisure activities (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 63). Reading books, for young Richard Rodriguez, means intellectual self-empowerment (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 2). He draws up long lists of canonical literature and diligently reads his way through them (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 65–6), thereby preparing for reading practices associated with school rather than individual enjoyment (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 67).

Besides reading, Rodriguez strives to imitate his teachers, to whom the scholarship boy is doubly welcome: not only does he confirm their professional achievements and pedagogical ideology (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 69), but by his imitation he also indicates that, to his mind, there is nothing so fundamentally desirable as being a teacher. Yet, as Rodriguez also observes, the star pupil’s capacity for imitation may also turn his peers against him and elicit charges of inauthenticity (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 71). He stands accused of being nothing more than an accomplished imitator, a sock-puppet skilled at repeating the thoughts of others (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 71). Against this condescending view of imitative learning, which can also be found in Hoggart, Rodriguez emphasizes that all schooling is imitative in nature (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 72). If imitation degraded the person imitating another as a mere copycat or talented ape, then education was doomed to remain a degrading experience (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 73).

But what particularly impresses Rodriguez is Hoggart’s analysis of the nostalgia that sooner or later seizes the scholarship boy. Since the scholarship boy has to leave the community of his family but is unable, in spite of his best efforts, to take root in another community, he develops a longing for a lost childhood (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 74). What started out as a move into wider society ends in retreat, isolation and loneliness. This is where nostalgia for the family home sets in (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 76). But returning to his parents, as Rodriguez tries to do after encountering the social figure of the scholarship boy during his studies in London, turns out to be less a homecoming than an anthropological excursion, with the parents as objects of sociological study (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 77). The prodigal son returns in the guise of a cultural analyst who cannot help decoding the semiotics of his parents’ lifestyle, acting as ‘a kind of anthropologist in the family kitchen, searching for evidence of our “cultural ties” as we ate dinner together’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 172; 169–70).

Reading, in the British Museum, the section on the scholarship boy inspires Rodriguez to a flurry of identification, allowing him to understand his own life story through the lens of Hoggart’s allegorical figure. However, for his autobiographical narrative of upward social mobility, Rodriguez adopts not only the figure of the scholarship boy but also the basic narrative model in which this figure is grounded, that is to say, the more or less radical and largely successful departure from a particular social context of origin – without, however, fully arriving and taking root in the destination context or being able to return to the context of origin. The figure of the person who has risen to a higher social class through education, which was described by authors such as Virginia Woolf and transposed from literature to sociology by Richard Hoggart, finds its way, via the reading room of the British Museum, into the individual self-analysis and social self-positioning of Richard Rodriguez, ultimately being adopted as the overarching formal principle of his autobiographical writing in Hunger of Memory. The figure of the scholarship boy serves him not only as a sociological tool for describing and explaining specific social phenomena, it also appears to underpin his entire sense of himself within his life-world. What this shows is that unlike, for instance, a social role, a social figure like that of the scholarship boy has a trans-situational character: a person is a scholarship boy in more than one situation – it is not a social role of the kind that can be dropped or shaken off. It is this applicability across social contexts that seems to make the social figure attractive to readers such as Rodriguez, to whom it presents an offer of personal identity.

What adds to the interest of this constellation is that the moment in which Rodriguez identifies with the social figure of the scholarship boy is also the moment in which that social figure tacitly moves from a British to an American context. This is not, however, accompanied by a reflection on the two countries’ different educational systems, nor does it account for differences in social structure either side of the Atlantic – the meanings, for instance, of ‘working class’ and ‘middle class’ differ considerably between Britain and the United States. Yet the social figure of the scholarship boy seems to possess a certain cultural self-evidence in both contexts, making its transposition seem plausible. Something similar might be said of the German-language reception of autobiographical works such as those of Pierre Bourdieu and Didier Eribon, whose sociological auto-narratives are credited with a high degree of self-evidence in the German-speaking countries even though the social-structural and national-cultural conditions in which education facilitates social advancement differ considerably. ¹¹

Narratives of Disidentification

Hunger of Memory opens with the triumphant rhetoric of an author eager to tell of his successful ascent of the social ladder: ‘I was a “socially disadvantaged” child. An enchantedly happy child. Mine was a childhood of intense family closeness. And extreme public alienation. Thirty years later I write this book as a middle-class American man. Assimilated’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 1). Yet where Rodriguez’s autobiography gets really interesting is not in this proud account of his own successes but rather in those passages in which the author describes the deep-seated ambivalence with which he relates to his family and the world it inhabits. It is apparent in this particularly striking scene:

the night at a brightly lit gasoline station (a blaring white memory) when I stood uneasily, hearing my father. He was talking to a teenaged attendant. I do not recall what they were saying, but I cannot forget the sounds my father made as he spoke. At one point his words slid together to form one word – sounds as confused as the threads of blue and green oil in the puddle next to my shoes. His voice rushed through what he had left to say. And, toward the end, reached falsetto notes, appealing to his listener’s understanding. I looked away to the lights of passing automobiles. I tried not to hear anymore. But I heard only too well the calm, easy tones in the attendant’s reply. Shortly afterward, walking toward home with my father, I shivered when he put his hand on my shoulder. The very first chance that I got, I evaded his grasp and ran on ahead into the dark, skipping with feigned boyish exuberance. (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 13–14)

The child’s shame and the adult’s subsequent shame for the child’s shame are repeatedly evoked by Rodriguez in similarly dense and paratactically formulated family scenes. In broad strokes, the family constellation from which the protagonist escapes as a scholarship boy is this: the child of immigrant parents, Rodriguez grows up in California. His father is for many years a factory worker and then a janitor; his mother is a typist but spends many years working in the family as a housewife. At the beginning of his autobiography, Rodriguez emphasizes his parents’ rootedness in the working class (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 10). The class transition from working to middle class is described as one from the ‘private’ sphere of the uneducated nuclear family to the ‘public’ sphere of an academically dominated mainstream society. Rodriguez thus defines his social class not by economic but solely by cultural criteria, that is, in terms of education (on this see Garcia, 2014: 106). As a scholarship boy who owes his social mobility to academic achievement, he is perhaps ‘structurally’ predisposed to conceiving of social stratification in cultural terms and to underestimating its economic aspects.

That Rodriguez is able to attend a good school in the first place is due to the fact that his parents live in a neighbourhood with an overwhelmingly ‘Gringo’ population (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 16). It is thus that he can enroll at a Catholic school whose student body consists of middle-class white children (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 9). As Rodriguez sees it, his academic success hinges entirely on improving his language skills: he arrives barely speaking English (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 13); on first entering the classroom, his English vocabulary, he recalls, ran to no more than 50 words (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 9). In public, his parents speak only ungrammatical and heavily accented English; to the child, their struggles with the language detract from their authority (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 13). At home, they speak only Spanish (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 11).

From the child’s perspective, Spanish is the ‘private language’ of the home and of joyous homecoming, while English is the ‘public language’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 14; see also p. 204). The difference between the domestic ‘interior’ and the social ‘exterior’ is marked by the language used in each, which imprints in the child’s mind the sense of strong rupture between the spheres (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 15). The language of ‘public society’ is one he has yet to learn (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 18), and the place he does so is the classroom (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 19). Yet the family soon receives a visit from teachers at the Catholic school who find fault with the child’s English and urge the parents to speak English at home wherever possible (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 20). The family’s switch to monolingualism is soon followed by academic success. Young ‘Ricardo’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 15) becomes, first, ‘Richard’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 30), then ‘Richie’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 194). Yet as his English improves, his confidence in using Spanish declines. The child all but stops speaking Spanish, for which his relatives chide him as a ‘pocho’ or ‘pochito’ (a rotten fruit) who has forgotten ‘his own language’ (‘su proprio idioma’) (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 29; see also p. 30). The experience of alienation and humiliation that academic success entails thus begins at the level of language.

Although these experiences of alienation intensify in the course of Rodriguez’s long education, they ultimately take on positive connotations. The radical break with one’s roots is the price to be paid for successful ‘assimilation’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 26; see also his controversial arguments against bilingual instruction in schools on pp. 33–7). To recall the scene at the petrol station: the son runs away from his family to reinvent himself as the son of educational institutions, for his parents have ceased to be his parents in a ‘cultural sense’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 2). The figures with whom he comes to identify are no longer his parents but his teachers acting in loco parentis. ¹² It therefore comes as no great surprise that the scholarship boy should want sooner or later to become a teacher or lecturer himself (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 70). Yet this achievement, which Rodriguez owes not least to his own desire to imitate his teachers, entails an estrangement from the milieu of his family. Since the son must leave home in order to find schooling, ¹³ it seems almost inevitable that he should one day come home to find that he and his parents have little to say to one another, that he has ‘lost’ his home (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 4). What is striking here is how Rodriguez emphasizes the transformative element in the story of his own education, crediting his success to his willingness to undergo a ‘radical self-reformation’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 70, 72). Education appears here not as a gentle and gradual process but instead as one that calls on the individual to sever all previous ties.

Forms of De-familiarization

The necessity of this rupture follows from the fundamental distinction underpinning Rodriguez’s understanding of social reality: that between the ‘private’ (and particular) and the ‘public’ (and universal). Rodriguez plots all aspects of the ambitious scholarship boy’s career along this vector running from ‘private’ to ‘public’. It follows the path by which the Mexican-American, Spanish-speaking son and quiet, unsuccessful schoolboy became an American, English-speaking, articulate and successful scholar and student; the path from the security of his family home and the intimacy of communal life to the alienation experienced in achievement-oriented educational institutions in which teachers reward solitary reading; and finally the path leading from the working class – the world of his parents, in which direct experience counts for more than education – to the academic middle-class milieu, dominated by abstract thinking, of the successful writer.

The basic difference, conceptually somewhat inconsistent, between ‘private’ and ‘public’ is the means by which Rodriguez ultimately discusses the relationship between particularism and universalism. And therein lies the main problem of his attempt at autobiographical description: Rodriguez is able to perceive his family and everything associated with his family origins (the Spanish-speaking Mexican-American working class) only as particular ¹⁴ while thinking of ‘official’ America and all it stands for (in this case, an English-speaking, college-educated Anglo-American middle class) only as universal. Another consequence of establishing a fundamental dichotomy between the two spheres is that from his marginal perspective (that of his family, which is completely excluded from the universal), the universal can be accessed only by decisively and comprehensively rejecting the particular. ¹⁵ In other words: the fact that all he is able to recognize in his origins is the ‘bad’ particular (while failing to notice the claims to universalization that are inherent even to what appears to be wholly particular) and that in American society, into which he hopes to ascend through education, he is able only to see the ‘good’ universal (while not observing the actual particularity of this claim to universality) renders him incapable of conceiving of a mediation between particularism and universalism. It hence comes as no surprise that he has little to say about the intermediary social organizations that often work towards such a mediation. ¹⁶ From an aesthetic viewpoint, structuring the entire narrative along this basic difference sometimes causes the life story to seem overly schematic and its characters stereotypical, the result of the author’s consistent efforts to situate each event on one side or the other of the dichotomy.

This dichotomous ‘logic’ underpinning the observation of the social also helps explain why, in Rodriguez’s autobiographical narrative of upward social mobility, the first break with his family is followed by a second, this time with his academic substitute family. Although, while a graduate student, he receives a job offer from Yale, he breaks with institutionalized higher education. To Rodriguez, the changes made to the structures supporting disadvantaged students in 1970s America seemed like attacks on his own self-understanding, for within his model of observation, they can only appear as impositions of re-particularization. In his perception, the new government programmes turn the universalist scholarship boy back into a particular ‘minority student’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 153). By having an ethnic label attached to a social disadvantage that had previously been located in the economic sphere (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 159–60), Rodriguez, who had hoped that education would help him to leave behind any form of particularism, finds himself re-particularized by these very institutions as ‘Hispanic-American’, ‘Latino’, ‘Mexican-American’ or ‘Chicano’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 155). With increasing administrative attention to ethnic categories in the academic milieu and elsewhere, ‘Richard’ or ‘Richie’ once again becomes ‘Señor Ricardo Rodriguez’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 174). Although he benefits considerably from these programmes (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 156), he is unable to reconcile this ascription of a collective identity with his self-image as a scholarship boy (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 70).

He finds himself unable to relate to a new generation of students who, while sharing his roots, no longer think they have to deny them completely to succeed in academia and in society at large. Rodriguez feels he worked hard to estrange himself from his context of origin and resents attempts at lessening this achievement:

I was a scholarship boy who belonged to an earlier time. I had come to the campus singly; they had come in a group. (It was in the plural that they often referred to themselves – as minority students.) I had been submissive, willing to mimic my teachers, willing to reform myself in order to become ‘educated’. They were proud, claiming that they didn’t need to change to become students. I had long before accepted the fact that education exacted a great price for its equally great benefits. They denied that price – any loss. (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 171–2)

As he recalls in Hunger of Memory, he even takes a polemical stand against these positions, which he perceives as instances of forced particularism, and comes to wider public attention through culturally conservative opinion pieces against affirmative action and bilingual education. ¹⁷ Such attitudes have made Hunger of Memory a highly controversial autobiographical text, one that is repeatedly and sharply attacked within the field of Latino or Chicano Studies – perhaps not least because they so openly challenge the implicit assumption that socially mobile minorities adopt a progressive political stance. ¹⁸ What Rodriguez writes against and what finally causes him to abandon his successful academic career is the imposition of a particular position within educational institutions – in other words, to be forced by government policy into being a ‘minority student’. ¹⁹

Hunger of Memory tells of the boundless will to become universal. ²⁰ The second great biographical rupture occurs at the precise moment when the institution that Rodriguez had taken to be the unquestioned standard of the universal – the university – classifies him as particular. This perceived symbolic banishment from the universal is followed by the drastic step of institutional self-exclusion. Rodriguez abandons his academic career to become a freelance writer and public intellectual, a status that not coincidentally refers to the weakly institutionalized areas of modern culture that are the last bastions of individual claims to universality. To the extent that a certain image of the public intellectual is plausible – one in which ambitions to universality are linked to a posture of distance, distance not least from all contexts of personal origin – Rodriguez matches it perfectly. What qualifies him is above all the literary treatment of his estrangement from his family – a case of literal de-familiarization. Only with this complete crossing of the boundaries delimiting the context of his family roots does the epistemic break occur which in turn brings into view an analysis of his own social origins. What is outlined here is an epistemic model that requires drastic distancing from the object of knowledge. ²¹ As Lora Romero has emphasized, this implies a reformulation of the traditional figure of the intellectual, whose epistemic authority is founded on personal de-familiarization, alienation and dislocation. ²² And precisely that may be a reason why so many intellectuals, whether or not they have benefited from social mobility through educational scholarships themselves, to this day are so interested in autobiographical narratives of disidentification and its hardships.

The Politics of Literary Form

The preceding pages have stressed those aspects of Hunger of Memory which concern both the protagonist’s rise to a higher social class by means of education and institutional support, and the individual challenges arising from it. Yet Hunger of Memory contains many further aspects which, though relevant to reflection on autobiographical narratives of upward social mobility, cannot be explored here at length. They include the perceived stigma of dark skin ²³ and a masculinity felt to be precarious – and, implicitly, the author’s own homosexuality. If Rodriguez, unlike Hoggart, views the scholarship boy in a fundamentally positive light, this is surely due also to the fact that academic mobility promises greater degrees of freedom in spheres of life not touched upon here.

Rodriguez describes his book as an ‘autobiographical essay’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 189) and as the story of his ‘education’ and ‘schooling’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 4). It also contains typical motifs of autobiographical narration such as leaving home and homecoming (see e.g. Blome, 2020; Romero, 1993: 122; Samoyault, 2013) or betrayal of one’s roots, ²⁴ as well as generic echoes of the fairy tale and the idyll (consider the fairy-tale tone in Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 1). It is the ‘idyll’ or ‘pastoral’ in particular that provides the model for conceptualizing the narrative of a life as one of social mobility through education. His suggestion that his work be read as ‘a kind of pastoral’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 4) – to be precise, a ‘middle-class pastoral’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 1) – is of considerable interest to the discussion of autobiographical narratives of upward social mobility.

Rodriguez’s allusions refer to the conception of the ‘pastoral’ as discussed at length by Raymond Williams in The Country and the City (Williams, 2016 [1973]: 18–48). Two of the key influences on and benchmarks for Hunger of Memory, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, thus turn out to be eminent Marxist literary theorists who were scholarship boys themselves. ²⁵ However, the protagonist of Hunger of Memory experiences topographical alienation (which, in the context of the idyll, has always already taken place), not between ‘city’ and ‘country’, as in the case of Raymond Williams, but between ‘family’ and ‘city’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 5–6). But why is the contradiction framed as one of city and family rather than the more predictable city and country? It is unlikely to be only because the story begins in a city, in the Californian state capital of Sacramento. On close reading, it emerges that this passage marks the intersection of two heterogenous semantic levels, forced together by the author to achieve a specific rhetorical effect: first, the pastoral with its contrast between city and country; second, the level of the author’s social spaces, in which the contrast is between the intimate community of the family and the (as it were) official setting of academic institutions. Mention of the ‘city’ allows the author to situate his own life story in the literary tradition of the idyll and the ideas associated with it. Adding the ‘family’, though heterogenous at the semantic level, allows him to remove any political charge from this literary figure of thought and give it a social-topographical meaning instead. The city to which the scholarship boy, now equipped with prestigious degrees, is ultimately admitted is the sociotope of the university-educated urban middle class of the United States of America.

In discussing his own university education, Rodriguez observes that studying literature had been a good preparation for reflecting on his own career and experience of social mobility. Indeed, the foundation for coming to terms with his story had been laid by absorbing the genre of ‘aristocratic pastoral literature’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 78). What the pastoral idyll invoked here implies is the praise of simplicity from the perspective of refinement, of the simple life by a social elite whose view is conditioned by its remoteness from the object of its praise. Rodriguez’s observations alternate between two registers. One is a pastoral that embraces progress, an idyllic stance that ends up confidently adopting the culturally superior position of one who has left the clearly delineated pastoral interior and has become capable of both reflection and description – the cultured, cosmopolitan writer whose melancholy reminiscences of his ‘simple’ roots remind him how far he has come. The other register is the elegiac, which, though it adopts a culturally superior position, cannot quite accept its personal ‘de-familiarization’ and is therefore unable to let go of an imaginary return home to an idyllic interior that is closed off.

What unites these two variants is that they each draw a firm boundary between the idyllic interior and the space from which the observer, in retrospect, describes that interior. Harking back to pastoral, this expresses a preference for an idea of genre that relies on a firm boundary between semiotic spaces (on this see Lachmann, 2002: 280–2). The breaking of this boundary in the course of academically enabled social mobility, far from undermining or dissolving it, only serves to confirm the boundary’s applicability. Since the spheres resist integration, and the de-familiarizing flight from the interior space cultivated by the parents is irreversible (on the irreversibility of assimilation in Rodriguez see Cutler, 2015: 90), return – as Henry Staten has so clearly shown – can be accomplished only by transposing homecoming into the realm of melancholy remembrance in the medium of a highly evocative literature. This literature thereby ultimately itself assumes the character of an ‘internal idyll’, an idyll of the child’s family life that, by sophisticated literary devices, is transposed into a form of grief that is to become the unassailable refuge of the self (on this see Staten, 1998: 110). It therefore comes as little surprise that Rodriguez replaces his childhood Spanish – which, as the language of the private sphere and intimacy, represents the idyllic interior space of the nuclear family – by literature, claiming that it reminded his adult protagonist of the possibility of ‘escaping public words’ (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 39). ²⁶

But it is not only the autobiography of upward social mobility through education told by Rodriguez in Hunger of Memory that turns out to be ‘pastoral’ in structure – this applies equally to the social figure of the scholarship boy it adopts. Hoggart had already conceived of the scholarship boy as a figure estranged from its stable social context of origin but unable to find a firm new social position. On the one hand, this figure is proud of its social estrangement and intellectual distance from its ancestral social context of origin, for it is by this distance that its social success, driven by education, is ultimately measured. Yet on the other hand, the figure will sooner or later find itself longing for the social and relational stability of its earlier context, while being fully aware that it can never be regained. The tension experienced by the scholarship boy between individual self-assurance and social loss of self, which Rodriguez promises to dissolve in the medium of literature, itself displays an idyllic structure. The scholarship boy can therefore be decoded as a rhetorical figuralization of the idyllic. Viewed thus, both the genre of the idyll or pastoral and the social figure of the scholarship boy stand for a similar ‘emotional structure’ or ‘way of feeling’ (on the foundation of Cultural Studies in emotional structures see also Lindner, 2000: 43). Rodriguez’s autobiographical narrative of upward social mobility captures an affective structure which is embedded not least in the social figure of the scholarship boy.

Readers of Hunger of Memory are likely, moreover, to come away with the impression that these affective structures – not least as a personally experienced ‘way of feeling’ – must be the product of a rhetorical amplification supported by certain literary devices. But for that moment of identification while reading Hoggart’s autobiographical narrative of upward social mobility in the British Museum, it would probably never have occurred to Rodriguez to find his life encapsulated in a single insight: ‘I was a “scholarship boy’” (Rodriguez, 2004 [1982]: 46). This incontrovertible realization of having always been a scholarship boy takes shape only with the help of literature.