Insights Into Being Social And/Or Social Being In Graham Swift’S World

This paper is part of a larger study that analyses, by resort to cultural studies, the way identity is constructed in relation to various spaces in Graham Swift’s fiction. The social sphere, where people interact while embracing roles, is considered to be one such “space” or arena. The individual is not a monad, but the resultant of the surrounding realities. Concepts taken from Bourdieu’s theory of social games and his habitus equation are relevant, along with those of Goffman’s social stage theory. We can signal two types of influences on Swift’s characters. One is a broader context, of mentalities, in which concepts such as “selfoccultation” or “adiaphorization” express haunting worries, along with the problem of confronting death. The other is the social realities that characters deal with – the post-war welfare state and progressive individualism towards Thatcherism. Torn between opposite tendencies, towards estrangement, on the one hand, and relationships, on the other, the characters use and abuse the positions that they occupy