Picking and Choosing: Essays on Prose Book

Schocket does not see class as just a stable definition that can be fixed in any one term. Still, he believes it can be a universal concept: "Class is totalizing, but it is simultaneously unstable. It does not describe entities and moments; it describes processes that are open to change" (x). Like so many scholars in working class studies, he bases much of his scholarship on Marx's teachings. The book's chapters look at literature immediately following the Civil War to the early 1940s, following the Great Depression. Many of the books he critiques are often overlooked in scholarship.

Although I am unaware of a lot of the books he discusses, Schocket does a couple of close looks at the writer Rebecca Harding Davis. He notes that she is not of the class, and therefore an observer. And though the gaze writers of the wealthier classes, like Davis, can be problematic, he argues that the gaze can invite sentiment, a common goal in nineteenth century literature.

The chapter "The Fetish of Being Inside" explores the body; especially interesting are the looks at text that deal with the working woman, from both male and female writers' perspectives. He states that the body itself was political, in literature as elsewhere. He looks at the pain of the worker, anywhere from marching to birth, death, and rape. Here, Schocket takes a close look at Meridel Le Sueur and how the problematic sharing of being an outsider looking in and being one of those insiders, suffering.