Raymond Williams
Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, and Stuart Hall initiated the intellectual movement in the U.K. that became known around the world as Cultural Studies. These thinkers critiqued industrial capitalism, identifying the impact that the Industrial Revolution had on the social and the natural order, especially during the period immediately after the Second World War. They championed working-class culture, the existence of which was being threatened by American popular culture.
Williams (1921-88) grew up in the Welsh village of Pandy, Abergavenny, the son of a railway signalman. He attended the local grammar school. He became a socialist in his teens, reading the Communist Manifesto (1848) with great interest. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, feeling an outsider because of his background. For a few years, he was a member of the Communist Party, but left rejecting Stalinism in politics and culture. Williams was put off by Stalin's cruel treatment of the peasants, not to mention his cultural policy, including social realism. During the Second World War, Williams served as a captain in an anti-Tank armoured division, taking part in the D-Day invasion of Europe. After the war, he taught (1946-60) in adult education programs at Oxford University, publishing Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), which established his reputation as a major communications/cultural studies critic and theorist. In due course, Williams distanced himself from Marxism: he replaced the Marxist concept of "mode of production" with "mode of information" as the dynamic core of society, and he redefined revolution as a long process of cultural change rather than a class struggle for political p...
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...d money will drive out good (Gresham's Law), so bad culture will drive out good. Our response to this analogy will have to be historical. True, we have much more bad culture (it is easier to distribute and we have more leisure to enjoy it), but we also have much more good culture. In fact, we live in an expanding culture, and all the elements in this culture are themselves expanding. If we start from this, we can ask real questions about the political and the economic problems raised by conditions (pp. 13-14).
WORKS CITED
Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy. London: Macmillan and Co.
Williams, Raymond. 1958a. "Resources of Hope." In N. McKenzie (Ed.), Convictions. London: MacGibbon and Kee, pp. 24-34.
---. 1958b. "Culture is Ordinary." In Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan (Eds.), Studies in Culture: An Introductory Reader. London: Arnold, 1997, pp. 5-14.
2. Why was this culture described in this article. If you do not know the answer to #1, you will not be able to answer this question correctly. (Minimum of 100 words)
Culture is something that binds people together and gives people an identity, but does one need to adhere to a set of norms to be a member of a certain culture? If someone deviates from cultural norms, does that mean this person is not a member of their perceived culture? In this essay, I will show that Becker’s argument in Culture: A Sociological View is flawed due to the use of fallacious analogies, historical record of rapid social change and uniqueness of micro social situations.
...dies in Culture: An Introductory Reader, ed. Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan. London: Arnold, 1997, pp. 104-21.
Scott Williams has lived in Fort McCoy as a cadet in the US Army most of his life. Scott spends all his time in the base and is used to a strict daily schedule that includes a morning shower, military and physical training, education in what subjects the military command deems necessary, and working on sorting out the army storerooms when not training.
...ey concepts in cultural studies. In Cultural studies: Theories and practice (pp. 8-12). London, England: Sage.
those who are in “High Culture”, or upper class citizens — about culture being something that isn’t bound to one idea, one definition. Rather, culture is something that is defined by many people, many social economic classes. This argument takes place at Cambridge among Williams’ colleagues (the “Kept Men”) in the mid 1900s. He argues his case, his opinions, to those who he went to school with, to those who he sits alongside within the tea shops. “Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purpose, its own meanings” (93). In that sentence, you find the first example of Williams’ opinion of why culture isn’t bound to
“According to, Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms” from Media, Culture and Society, Raymond Williams and E.P Thompson summarize about the way they saw culture, they refer it to the way of life and saw mainstream media as the main role in capitalist society. “Williams says that, his perspective and ideas are referred to culture as to social practice, he saw “culture as a whole way of life” and as to structuralism that makes the concept of
Stuart Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica on February 3, 1932. After receiving a Rhodes scholarship in the 1950 he came to Britain in order to study at Merton College at the University of Oxford. He was a member of the Windrush generation, when a great number of African-Caribbeans migrated to the UK and other parts of Europe in the search of a better future. It is interesting to note that he was part of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1957. The publication of his book “The Popular Arts” (Hall and Whannel 1967; first published in Britain in 1964) ten years later led to the invitation by Richard Hoggart, another important figure in the founding of British Cultural Studies, to join the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. In 1968 he replaced Hoggart as the director of the institution and held the position until 1979. The BCCCS might be considered the cradle of cultural studies in Britain and some might even say that is the pivotal institution in the history of cultural studies in general. After leaving his position at the Centre, Hall became a professor at the Open University. He retired in 1997. Throughout his career, Hall stressed the practical impact that cultural studies can have on...
In nineteenth-century England, when the Industrial Revolutions and Reform Acts happened, new cultures were formed amongst the working class, and these new cultures include “[...] trade unions, working-class life styles (as incorporated into ‘popular’ journalism, advertising, and commercial entertainment)” (124). In this example of an emergent culture in nineteenth- century England, Williams emphasizes that emergent culture is either an alternative or an opposition to the dominant culture. As Williams’s example, newly formed classes are non-dominant classes, and they create cultures to either substitute or disagree with the dominant culture. However, the dominant culture still exists; thus, “the process of emergence, in such conditions, is then a constantly repeated, an always renewable, move beyond a phase of practical incorporation: usually made much more difficult by the fact that much incorporation looks like recognition, acknowledgement, and thus a form of acceptance” (124-125). Moreover, as we discussed in class, mass culture relies on and absorbs popular culture which is a culture derived from working class. In other words, many of cultures that we consider as mass culture might have been an emergent culture once- that later mass
In the introduction to “The Pure Products Go Crazy,” James Clifford offers a poem by William Carlos Williams about a housekeeper of his named Elsie. This girl is of mixed blood, with a divided common ancestry, and no real collective roots to trace. Williams begins to make the observation that this is the direction that the world is moving in, as Clifford puts it—“an inevitable momentum.” Clifford believes in that, “in an interconnected world, one is always to varying degrees, ‘inauthentic.’” In making this statement, Clifford is perhaps only partially accurate. In the western hemisphere, where Williams was located, perhaps it can be said directly that the influence of modern society has attributed to the lack of general ancestry, as one culture after another has blended with the next. Perhaps it can be said as well that, as Clifford puts it, “there seem no distant places left on the planet where the presence of ‘modern’ products, media, and power cannot be felt” (Clifford, 14). The intention of this paper is to contend first that there is essentially such a thing as “pure” culture, and contrary to Clifford’s belief, that there are “pure” unblended cultures that remain (while not altogether untouched by foreign influence), natural within themselves. It will be argued as well that the influence of modern society does not necessarily lead to a loss of cultural soundness itself, but rather that a presence of certain cultural practices within the respective cultures has attributed to the lasting “purity” of certain cultures. In this case, we will be discussing the cultures that exist in Haiti and Bali.
Prooftexts 24.1 (2004): 99-115. Ransome, William F. "Above The Sceptred Sway": Retrieving The Quality Of Mercy." Crtica 40.119 (2008): 3-27. Scott, William O. & Co. "Conditional Bonds, Forfeitures, And Vows
In his article “Culture Is Ordinary”, Raymond Williams defines culture, based on his knowledge, and experience –which would, as he defines, would be his culture. He starts his article with simply giving a definition according to his understanding by telling what is and is not culture, and continues with the reasons he doesn’t agree with some of Marxist ideas of culture, and that of F. R. Leavis’. While giving reasons for his disagreements, he gives solid examples from both people he knows and doesn’t know.
Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development {…} but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought.
First, the new-born social level of the lower middle classes were to be recognized as the representatives of the top British education. Second, the innovative curriculum was to be provided in all British Universities, suggesting placing the English literature in the central position in the education system (Leavis,2009, p.85). However, the First World War led to the popularization of the nihilism in the British society that damned urgent replacing of accents in the mass culture (Lewis, 2009, p.87). Modernism and the ideas about the absence of God provoked setting two branches in the shsh culture. The first comprised irrational mystics, while the other one dealt with individuals realizing their mechanical existence, inevitable death, and the meaningless of their life. The Second World War and the cultural postmodernism fostered the strong necessity of rethinking the major postulates of the cultural aims and principles that led to originating of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964 (Lewis, 2009,
For an extensive period of time, sociologists and anthropologists have attempted to define culture. It is well known, that such concept is one with various, intrinsic definitions and subject to multiple interpretations, therefore being extremely laborious to define; laborious, to the extent that: “Despite a century of efforts to define culture adequately, there was in the early 1990s no agreement among anthropologists regarding its nature.” (Apte (1994: 2001), as cited in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics). Nonetheless, the classical definition states that: “Culture… is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” (Sir Edward