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Raymond Williams 1921–1988 -  England


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At his death in 1988, after a career of 40 years, he left behind more than 650 publications, including 27 academic books, 5 novels, 3 plays, 7 pamphlets, 60 columns on television in The Listener, and more than 500 articles and reviews, among them his regular book reviews for the Guardian and New Society.

Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (1958)

Raymond Williams, Communications (1962, 3d ed., 1976), 

The Country and the City (1973), 

Culture (1981), 

Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1952, rev. ed., 1968), 

The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970), 

Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976, rev. ed., 1983), 

The Long Revolution (1961, rev. ed., 1966), 

Marxism and Literature (1977), 

Modern Tragedy (1966), 

Politics and Letters: Interview with "New Left Review" (1979), 

Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (1980), 

Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), 

Towards 2000 (1983).


Writing Available on the Internet


Commentary

John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory

New Criterion

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/W/htmlW/williamsray/williamsray.htm

INTERNET COMO HERRAMIENTA DE INVESTIGACION LITERARIA:

Terry Eagleton, ed., Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives (1989); Jan Gorak, The Alien Mind of Raymond Williams (1988); Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow, "An Interview with Raymond Williams," Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (ed. Tania Modleski, 1986); Lesley Johnson, The Cultural Critics: From Matthew Arnold to Raymond Williams (1979); Alan O'Connor, Raymond Williams: Writing, Culture, Politics (1989); J. P. Ward, Raymond Williams (1981).


Quotations

1958, "Culture is Ordinary" page 6 :

Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land. The growing society is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind. The making of a mind is, first, the slow learning of shapes, purposes, and meanings, so that work, observation and communication are possible. Then, second, but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience, the making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings. A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested. These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings. We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life--the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning--the special processes of discovery and creative effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction. The questions I ask about our culture are questions about deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind.

"If I am asked finally to define my own position, I would say this. I believe in the necessary economic struggle of the organised working class. I believe that this is still the most creative activity in our society, as I indicated years ago in calling the great working class institutions creative cultural achievements, as well as the indispensable first means of political struggle. I believe that it is not necessary to abandon a parliamentary perspective as a matter of principle, but as a matter of practice I am quite sure that we have to begin to look beyond it . . . I think that no foreseeable parliamentary majority will inaugurate socialism unless there is a quite different kind of political activity supporting it . . . involving the most active elements of community politics, local campaigning, specialised interest campaigning . . . I believe that the system of meanings and values which a capitalist society has generated has to be defeated in general and in detail by the most sustained kinds of intellectual and educational work. This is a cultural process which I called `the long revolution' . . . a genuine struggle which was part of the necessary battles of democracy and of economic victory for the organised working class. People change, it is true, in struggle and by action. Anything as deep as a dominant structure of feeling is only changed by active new experience. But this does not mean that change can be remitted to cannot be typed with this method of action otherwise conceived. On the contrary the task of a successful socialist movement will be one of feeling and cannot be typed with this method imagination quite as much as one of fact and organisation."

(from Raymond Williams, "You're a Marxist Aren't You?" in Resources of Hope (Verso, London 1989).