Kent's Ten Key Values of
Proletarian Post-Modernism

1. The insistence upon a tough-minded grip on reality.

2. A willingness to confront the self searchingly and even with laughter.

3. Patience and endurance.

4. Humour as a tool for transcendence.

5. A sort of dead-end courage, and not so dead-end.

6. An acceptance of the role of suffering in retaining one's humanity and in retaining some perspective on the humanity of the oppressor.

7. A high development of dissimulation and camouflage.

8. A sense of something more than this world and of its rhythms.

9. A deep sense of the inexorable limitation of life and all that we associate
with the tragic and tragicomic vision.
10. Ceremonies or poise in a non-rational universe.
(The hipsters and the cool-cats play an endless satire upon
Western assumptions of rationality.)

Taken from George E. Kent's 'Ethnic Impact in American Literature'
a lecture read at the Annual Meeting of the
College Language Association, 1967.