I'll comment more to the main post, but (having just reread our conversation from last time and hey, I said some fairly smart stuff!) just wanted to add that the working-class intellectual as stereotype really gets to the heart of what I was saying. As you're accounting for class, it's an impossible position, no? And I think the availability of that position pretty much epitomizes the difference between what we're calling UK and US discourses of class. The working-class intellectual (which is a positionality made available historically by the period in which higher education was free and subsidized in the UK, as well as by cultures that valued autodidacticism) and also the genteel poor, which -- hmm -- is pretty much Giles when he's unemployed.

(The British type of the working-claas intellectual is also the class narrative I have most personal affinity with, though it doesn't map 100% and there may be some touches of the genteel poor floating around though I fervently disavow them; as is probably deeply obvious from my cumulative postings. :) )