After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain (original) (raw)
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Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, 2022
The essay reads Williams's The Country and the City to argue for the centrality of imperialism and global unevenness engendered by the capitalist mode of production as key aspects of the text. It focuses on Williams's method in the penultimate chapter of the text to show him formulating, if idiosyncratically, a reading strategy that is comparative and global in scope, and one that anticipates the globaletics of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. It deploys Williams's method, and his delineation of the pastoral and counter-pastoral landscapes, to illustrate their usefulness for reading the poetic landscapes in the works of Bankim Chandra Chatterji and Rabindranath Tagore from nineteenth-and early twentiethcentury colonial Bengal. In sum, the essay seeks to situate Williams as a key figure within the tradition of materialist anti-colonial theorising and The Country and the City as an important, if unremarked, resource for World and Comparative Literature.
Devolution and Cultural Catch-Up: Decoupling England and its Literature from English Literature
Literature of an Independent England, 2013
In a paper published shortly before the first referendumsaumsa on devolution in Scotland and Wales in 1979, Raymond Williams drew attention to two possible kinds of English reaction to the nationalist movements in those nations. The first of these was what Williams referred to as the 'unity backlash,' through which, Williams explained, a governing elite would seek to forestall and prevent other groups of people from gaining control of their own resources and working out their own futures in their own ways (Williams 1978: 189). The 'unity backlash' would, Williams warned, be carried out in the name of a spurious British unity, combining emotional appeal with political rhetoric capable of masking the particular economic interests of a minority served in that name. The second possible English response Williams identified was a 'why not us?' response (Williams 1978: 189ibid.). Williams used the rhetorical phrase 'why not us?' to draw attention to the fact that what many of the things left-wing nationalist groups in Scotland and Wales were aiming to achieve were also real material aims for socialist political movements in England: control over communal decision-making and access to resources. Accordingly, Williams stated that the 'why not us?' response in England was one that 'every genuine nationalist would welcome' in Wales (Williams 1978: 189ibid.). Implicit in the views expounded by Williams is the idea that devolution in Scotland and Wales provides a model that, by campaigning in the same material areas, oppositional political and cultural groups in England might positively seek to emulate. Much of Raymond Williams's work in the sociology of culture was concerned with Comment [MG1]: Wordcount too high
Towards Cultural Materialism: Criticism and Hegemony in Raymond Williams
This article analyses Raymond Williams' concept of "cultural materialism" through the theoretical and political contexts which framed his thought in the 1970s. His dialogue with the continental Marxist tradition -Lucien Goldmann, Georg Lukàcs and Antonio Gramsci, principally -marks a significant shift from the organicist and broadly reformist ideas articulated in earlier works such as Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961). Williams' development of the Gramscian theory of hegemony in particular offers both a fresh start for critical practice beyond the narrow disciplinary margins of "the literary", and a sharp tool of analysis for new social antagonisms and problem-spaces.
The literary and cultural criticism of Raymond Williams
Neohelicon, 1987
has exerted considerable influence on criticism in Britain and elsewhere, so that it is well worthwhile to follow his ideas and their development. He directly continues the line of English critics formed by Eliot, Lawrence and Leavis. The last-mentioned of these three is the most important early influence; we may justly call him Williams's mentor. For, studying English Literature at Cambridge in the early forties, he began his career as a disciple of Leavis. It can hardly surprise that the first project upon which Williams embarked in that period, a journal called Politics and Letters (1947-1948) he edited together with two others, reads like a pale extension of Scrutiny. The very first editorial abounds in typical Leavisite expressions like 'greater awareness', 'synthesis of human and material richness', 'a more complete consciousness', etc. The journal's bent became even clearer in the combined second and third issues, which opened with a quotation from Matthew Arnold to the effect that culture "does not try to teach down to the inferior classes; it does not try to win them over to this or that sect of its own, with ready judgements and watchwords". In its first paragraph the editorial restates that form of modernist aestheticism which one may call the Leavisite circularity: literature cannot be explained in any terms except those of literature. "We cannot give an answer which would satisfy the social scientist, because the final statement cannot be given in terms of science. It is a literary statement". Furthermore, the editorial endorses the cult of D.
Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies
2011
This radical reassessment shows how, after the Second World War, British national identity and culture was shaped in ways that still operate today. As empires declined, globalisation spread, and literature responded to these influences. As Graham MacPhee explains, postwar writers blended the experimentalism of prewar modernism with other cultural traditions. In this way, they reveal both the pain and the pleasures of multiculturalism, as they seek to cope with the shock of post-imperial downsizing.
Acta Sociologica, 2007
C ulture has in many ways become a central subject within the humanities and the social sciences of today. The so-called cultural turn bears witness to this. The statement that Raymond Williams made a seminal contribution to this development is not controversial, yet wherein this contribution lies is a more controversial issue. Paul Jones' study is of particular significance here with its insistence on Williams' later contributions, and not just his early work, making him one of the founders of cultural studies. Moreover, Jones' book is not an introduction to, or overview of, Williams' oeuvre, rather it focuses particularly on Williams' contribution to the sociology of culture. Its merit is to delineate critically precisely this contribution. Of course, Jones has to bring out what Williams put into the culture category, but this is no easy task. One common interpretation of Williams has to be overcome, and that is seeing him struggling with the tension between high and low culture. Of course Williams talked about culture as an ideal, a process of human perfection and as a particular way of life. One of Jones' points is to recognize that this is not the whole story: culture for Williams is, and very early on, also something documentary, a body of work variously recording human thought and experience. One critical insight of Williams is that so-called high culture is constituted by a selective tradition; in other words, alternative and critical insights are to be found already in the recorded culture. And this has implications also for the study of culture as a particular way of life, which was of great concern for Williams, yet not in the anthropological sense, as the common interpretation conveys, but as a key to the structure of the feeling of the times. Structure of feeling is a notoriously difficult concept in Williams' thinking. As it has to do with what is emergent, it speaks about generations. Jones makes an important observation here, connecting this concept with Williams' interest in the key words of modern life, words like media, communication, artist or conservatism. Semantic shifts in such words have much to say about societal change-an insight Williams shares with the German Begriffsgeschichte. This intellectual parallel is not noticed by Jones, though his discussion of Williams so-called social formalism reveals it so clearly. For Williams, the analysis of cultural forms was a crucial key in the study of culture and society, in detecting their interconnectedness. Innovations in cultural forms do not emerge solely out of pure creativity, but this creativity is socially conditioned. Thus, cultural forms have something to tell about social change-a lesson Williams demonstrated with full force in his study of drama. However, there is a specific cumulativity in cultural forms; thus, old forms are not being substituted by new ones. So, how this social conditioning operates is a historically open question. Indeed, Jones' discussion of Williams' social formalism in aspects like these comes very close to Reinhart Koselleck's subtle clarification of the relations between conceptual and social history. Williams developed his social formalism against structuralism, particularly an unhistorical, aprioristic, understanding of the sign. Discussing this, Jones makes a comparison between Williams and the position of Stuart Hall, the head of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during its most productive years. Despite a certain opposition between their respective positions, depending on a mutual misrecognition, Jones succeeds in demonstrating them as complementary. If Hall's primary focus was the cultural code being transmitted in the media and its reception, Williams focused primarily on the production side of the work and its cultural form. They shared the counter hegemonic ambition. This brings us directly into Williams' sociology of culture. At its heart we find cultural forms, that is, forms that are socially produced and the analysis of which reveals social relations and social material in artworks. Many of Williams' more substantial works deal with such matters, Book Reviews