Joe Moran: Histories of the Everyday

Professor Joe Moran is a British cultural historian and a Professor of English Literature in the Faculty of Society and Culture. He is known for writing histories of the complex thoughts that we bury in our everyday culture. He has written a heavy shelf of popular books including First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life (2018), Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness (2016), and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009).

When we met, Joe described himself to me as more a storyteller or writer than a ‘researcher’. He focuses on making our lives visible to ourselves. A lot of his work examines ‘the bleeding obvious kind of things’ that seem so routine we overlook them. Joe calls these topics ‘the history of the present’, reminding his readers that recent past is a historical mesh of significant change, nostalgic myth, and living memory. As Joe says, ‘I write about things that are at first glance unpromising materials for research, but they are part of people's lives, and hopefully people will appreciate having these unnoticed parts of their lives being made sense of’.

Storytelling and stealth history

Joe subtitled Roads as ‘a hidden history’ but says it could really be ‘a stealth history’. It tells a history of post-war Britain through a topic that people do not think about so often because it is so common. He tends toward these topics because they open into a subtle mix of ideas that make the everyday manifest. Roads connect to many other issues - politics, architecture, landscape, markets, human behaviour – so they become a ‘history of us’. They reveal hidden attitudes that we take for granted and that are culturally specific even as they are constantly changing. For Joe, when an attitude is quiet or hidden, it may seem to be shared when it’s really made of lots of people having different mentalities over time. As Joe tells me, there might be a time when we cannot think about roads without also thinking about the environmental emergency. When that comes, it will be important to have a route back through our culture to think about how roads and cars became so central to them. People could know what roads meant to people in the late 1950s, when the first motorways arrived, and what they could have symbolised then.

Joe’s work involves preserving our culture and different people’s ability to speak about it with their own agency. Some of the topics he examines are so common and overlooked that they seem abnormal on the page. Joe’s method is to cultivate a lyrical quality, to tell histories where our everyday actions do not seem to be so normal. When he does this, Joe focuses on the details of people’s lives in a cinematic style. ‘This is especially important if you're writing about supposedly boring things. I try to tell stories. I try to paint pictures in the reader's mind’.

This approach was key in Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness. Joe wrote with other people’s stories to show that shyness is as complex as it is common, that ‘It's not about retreating from social life. It's often about sublimating your social instincts into other areas’. Shy people have been successful performers, writers, artists, creative people, or scientists. Sometimes, shyness can be a lot of things at once, both funny and revealing of our common humanity. Joe tells me how ‘we shy people can be funny because we often do things quite weirdly and indirectly. I wrote about the diversity of things they do to communicate with people in tangential ways’.

When Joe used details from day-to-day stories to show how shyness affects lots of unlikely people, the book became a two-way communication with readers. People wrote to Joe after reading Shrinking Violets, some telling him about their shyness, others about shyness in their family. People told him the book gave them more ways to understand the everyday experience of shyness with their families. The book tries to avoid what he calls a ‘redemptive arc’. He was not trying to write a self-help book, to give solutions or take shyness away, and people responded to this. Similarly, after Joe wrote a history of British television watching habits, Armchair Nation (2013), people wrote to him about what they had recognised from their own lives: the programmes they remembered watching and the feelings they evoked. The work was enabling people to preserve and participate in an intangible community of television viewers. Cultural history is common ground for building solidarity through unlikely communities.

Working outside the university

Joe tells me that cultural habits are a touchstone, something to preserve in histories. When we look at those histories, though, we see the habits tend to be resilient. Armchair Nation ended in 2012, with the analogue signal turning off in Britain. At the time, people thought there would be a fundamental change in how we approached the idea of watching television as a nation. With the new digital signal, television watching would become more individual. But when we look from then to now, we see people still want community. It is a tenacious desire. It has implications for how we plan our future too, that perhaps a technological evangelism that says everything will change in this new age is not quite right. Our cultures have such ingrained habits and new technologies need to adapt to them. Cultural history shows that the habits remain; it’s the technologies that are vulnerable to change.

One of these cultural habits is something so fundamental as how we make and think about sentences. First You Write a Sentence has been influential, but it's not a style guide: ‘I don’t like them so much’, Joe underlines. In all sorts of settings, people have told Joe that his indirect, historical approach changed their ideas of how to write. He received requests to run writing workshops for the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office, the Guardian Masterclass series and public libraries. In those sessions, he showed the sentence as the building block of writing, that writers are often more interested in sentences than individual words. He talked about the nuts and bolts of how we shape words into syntax, and the skill of communicating by omitting things that get in the way of what we want to say.

Power in the everyday

Joe’s work on sentences draws out hidden power relationships in our working lives. There’s a growing inclusivity problem with organisational rhetoric. An organisation could hire people for who they are but then train them to write in a flattened way that stops them communicating or taking responsibility as individuals. The problem ‘is being amplified as people assume we should rely on artificial intelligence’ and lose sight of us as ‘messy, complicated, non-algorithmic’ human beings.

Joe tells me organisational cultures make for official writing that relies on ‘huge’ abstract nouns, often placed into sentences that lack clear subject-object verb relationships. The result is communication where nobody has agency. There’s aggression in using alienating language, especially if it seems that people are not using it to communicate as people. So, in his workshop sessions, Joe empowers people to write in different ways with their own preferences. The sessions can talk about omission, about verbs that say who is doing what, about what abstraction does. People can apply these principles whenever they write, whether that’s in a novel or in an official document.

Cultural participation

Joe is working on a new cultural history of people watching. He tries to have public impact by taking the writing he has worked on and then using it to make connections with people outside academia who have their own expertise. This could be with workshops, lectures, or collaborative arts. For example, he has worked with an artist to use Roads in an exhibition in a motorway service stop. The work could stand out and encourage people to see their everyday lives as places to participate in culture, not as a world to accept passively.

Joe’s approach is to get past abstractions and embrace the messiness of working with people. There are lots of abstract nouns out there. ‘Research’. ‘Impact’. ‘Engagement’. These nouns lose the necessary messiness of working with people. And the messiness is the best part. Big words lose the serendipity and the responsiveness of working with human beings, as individuals or as a community. These are things we need to preserve and make part of our plans.

Writing can be a gift that you give to somebody else, basically saying, ‘I've discovered this. Isn't it great? I've shaped it in a way that I think you might like. Here it is’. Academic writing sometimes has a received need to be watertight and defend a thesis. Without meaning to, it can buy into the impersonality and power relationships of an official structure, becoming airless. At their best, Joe sees universities as places to talk about what life means for us as human beings. There are rich, durable habits that we have built up as our culture. ‘They shape us all. People want to understand them’.

Joe spoke with Martin Brooks.