Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams (born August 31, 1921 in Llanfihangel Crucorney , Wales , † January 26, 1988 ) was a British Marxist cultural theorist and is considered the founder of cultural studies .
Life
Raymond Williams was born into a railway family in the rural Wales borderland . He was one of the first generation of British working-class children to make it into higher education. After studying at Trinity College , Cambridge , he taught adult education for several years before he was appointed professor of dramatic arts at the University of Cambridge (1974-1983). As an avowed socialist, he was primarily interested in the relationships between language, literature and society. He has published numerous books, essays and articles on these and other topics.
In his work Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958) he arrived at his much-cited definition of culture as a “comprehensive way of life”, “as a way of representing all of our shared experiences”. This definition shows Williams' willingness to extend literary text analysis to a wider subject area. In the last chapter of Culture and Society , Williams counteracts the elitist ideas of the cultural studies of the time against popular culture . Mass distribution does not yet determine the quality of an artifact; quality must be determined within the art genre. This means that aesthetic value is retained as a fundamental category.
In Williams' second work, The Long Revolution (1961), which is decisive for cultural studies , he defines culture as a way of life that is expressed in everyday behavior as well as in art and literature . He succeeded in a paradigm shift from an understanding of “culture” as a “refined way of life, way of life” to the so-called “broad concept of culture”.
He was lifelong involved in grassroots political movements - in the 1950s and 1960s within the New Left, in the 1970s in Welsh and eco-socialist contexts, in the 1980s, for example, in favor of the great miners' strikes . In 1967 he published with Edward P. Thompson and Stuart Hall , the "May Day Manifesto", a polemic on May 1 , in which the authors of the Social Democratic Labor -Regierung abrechneten, and showcased their technocratic society thinking.
The Raymond Williams Society has existed since 1989 and publishes, among other things, the magazine Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism and endeavors to research the topics that William himself worked on.
Fonts
- Reading and Criticism (1950)
- Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1952)
- Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958); translated by Heinz Blumensath: Social Theory as Conceptual History, Studies on the Historical Semantics of "Culture" (1972)
- The Long Revolution (1961)
- Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974)
- Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (1976)
- People of the Black Mountains, a semi-fictional history
- Marxism and Literature (1977)
- Politics and Letters: Interviews with "New Left Review" (1981)
- The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists
- A trilogy of novels , Border Country (1960), Second Generation (1964), and The Fight for Manod (1979)
- Studies in social history, politics, cultural studies and communications.
- Introduction and Culture (1983)
- Politics and Letters. Interviews with New Left Review (2015)
literature
- Roman Horak, Ingo Pohn-Lauggas, Monika Seidl (eds.): About Raymond Williams. Approximations. Positions. Outlook , Argument, Hamburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-86754-314-9 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Raymond Williams in the catalog of the German National Library
- Works by and about Raymond Williams in the German Digital Library
- Website of the Raymond Williams Society
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Williams, Raymond |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British publicist and critic |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 31, 1921 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Llanfihangel Crucorney , Wales |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 26, 1988 |