Raymond Williams (1921-1988): An Overview

• Criticism on Raymond
• Conclusion
• References
Biography
• Raymond Williams (1921-1988) was an author, academic, cultural theorist, literary critic, public intellectual, socialist, and a leading figure of the New Left. He was the son of working-class parents from a Welsh border village, an adult education tutor, a Cambridge professor, and, according to Terry Eagleton, was and wasn’t a Marxist.
• From such unique positions, he established a new mode of critical analysis, cultural materialism, grounded in a concept of culture which identifies cultural practice as part of an active, dynamic, historical process.
• His work consistently draws attention to two strands within cultural forms: the contingent and the subjunctive. The former figures history as driven by human action while the latter looks for moments which ask what alternatives are possible and how.
• From here, Williams developed a number of enduring theoretical concepts:
◦ he identified a ‘structure of feeling’, what he described as ‘the area of interaction between the official consciousness of an epoch […] and the whole process of actually living its consequences’;
◦ he insisted upon viewing culture as ‘ordinary’, as everyday and (potentially at least) democratic, being constantly made and re-made;
◦ and he formulated three forces or tensions within the development of cultural form: the residual (pre-existing and traditional), the dominant (central and defining), and the emergent (new and challenging).
• All of these give a glimpse into his relevance and influence as well as providing a way of analyzing and critiquing cultural transformation, placing a primary focus on culture as, what Williams notably called, ‘a whole way of life’, something made and lived.
BOOKS BY RAYMOND WILLIAMS:
• Reading and Criticism (Frederick Muller, 1950)
• Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (Chatto & Windus, 1952)
• Drama in Performance (Watts, 1954)
• Preface to Film (with Michael Orram). Williams’s section of the book is titled: ‘Film and the Dramatic...

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