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Raymond Williams: -Literature"

Table of Coatents

1 Introduction
12 Objectives
13 Raymond Williams - a brief biosketch
14 Ravmond Williams as a Marxist critic
14.1Cultural Materialism
15 Literature" -Summary and Analysis
1.6 Review

1.7 Comprehension
L8 References

*Raymond Williams, "Literature." Marzismand Literature. USA: Oxford UP. 1978. . 45

54.Print

11Introduction

The second unit of Module Idiscusses an essay by renowned Marxist critic Raymond
Williams. The essay Literature" is a chapter in William's renowned work Mrin n
Literatwe (1977). In this essay Williams atempts to explain that literary theory is fundamental to
society as a whole.

1.2Objectives
This unit will help the student to know about:

1) the life and literary career of RaymondWilliams

Raymond Williams as a Marxist critic
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3) Raymond Williams' critical ideas exnlained in the essay "Literatire

1.3 Raymond Williams - a brief bio sketch

1921 - 26 January 1988) was a Welsh Marxist
Raymond Henry Williams (31 Au
novelist and critic. Born in the Welsh border country in 1921, Williams spent
heorist, academic,
childhood in a rural working-class community. This helped him to imbibe values and
nis
which would later on inspire his life's work. He won a scholarship
Concerms at a very early age,
to study English. But his education was held up in 1941
to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1939
wernt for military service. After serving four years in the army he returned to Cambridge in
as he
completed his degree and became a tutor in the Workers' Educational Association. Thie
1945. He
phase as he had begun analysing the idea of culture in relation to the contemporary
was a crucial
use of the term.

Culture and
Williams' analysis was published as the influential book
studies of
Society (1958). Another book, The Long Revolution (1961) includes
cultural production and discusses in detail the history of industrial capitalism in
relation to the forms of communication such as the press, advertising, education
and the new media, It revealed Willianms' dedication in identifying cultural
activity as a major productive activity, not just the expression of economic and
political determinations. Oher books expressing such concerns include Communications (1962;
revised edition 1976), Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) and Towards
2000 (1983).

Williams was appointed as a University Lecturer in English and Fellow of Jesus College.
University of Cambridge in 1961, He published books on literary works as social forms. These
include Modern Tragedy (1966), The English Novel: Dickens to Lawrence (1970), The Country
and the City (1973), Marxism and Literature (1977), Problems in Materialism and Culture (1980)
and Writing in Society (1984). An avid interest in drama and its social reality in different
historical contexts is evident in Drama from lbsen to Eliot (1952; revised as Drama from
lbsen to
Brecht, 1968); Drama in Performance (1954); and Preface to Film (with Michael Orrom, 1954).
In 1974 he became Cambridge University's Judith E.
Wilson Professor of Drama'. Williams
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wrote plays for BBC television and published six

novels such as the autobiographical Border
Country (1960) and the posthumously published, historical People of
the Black Mountains (1989
&1990). Key Words (1976) is a
continuation of the work done during the writing of Culture and
Society. It is an investigation of the social
determination of the meaning of words like class.
culture. society, individual, ideology etc. The emphasis of Key
Words is not only on the historical
origin and development of words of social and
cultural importance but also on their present
meanings, implications and relationships. The vast influence of
Williams played a crucial role
along with Richard Hoggart, in establishing
"cultural studies" as a legitimate interest of literary
academics.

The essay "Literature is taken from

Raymond Williams' critical revision of Marxist
thinking about culture and society in Marxism and Literature (1977).
1.4 Raymond Williams as a Marxist critic

Raymond Williams is one of the most influential Marxist critics of the

twentieth century.
His work with the journal New Left Review and the
Birmingham Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies laid the foundation of Cultural Studies as a
discipline. He elaborated concepts
like "hegemony and "ideology" to analyse cultural practices in society.
Williams showed the
ideological bases for the meanings of words. He stated that a word's changing meaning can be
linked to a changing new social and intellectual movement." In his Culture and
Society (1958),
he studied the English social change after the Industrial Revolution. He traced the idea of
culture
that developed in England from the late eighteenth century analysing the literary works of
English authors such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Edmund Burke and George
Orwell. Williams differed from the traditional concepts of base and superstructure. He deviated
from the traditional Marxist notion of base as too rigid. His argument was that the economic base
is aprocess and not a static condition or object. The base should include not just the industry that
produces but the human labour that reproduces, i.e., the entire realm of social practices.

Williams believed that traditional Marxist concepts of base and superstructure cannot
always explain art forms or cultural practices. He borrowed from Louis Althusser, a significant
concept termed "overdetermination". Social
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multiple social forces that determine the nature and content of a cultural practe
to the factors that determine a cultural practice. Williarns defires
Overdetermination refers
experienced individually but which are always cial
determination as that which"may be
indeed social formations". Williams developed his theories in solidarity with Grarni.
specific
What makes Williams' theory significant and relevant in h.
Lukacs, Adomo and Goldmann.
Marxist aesthetics takes divergent forms, is the incorporation of the
present situation, when
writers in the formulation of his own theory. Williams' reassessme
theoretical strains of these
Marxism in formulating a Marxist literary theory is characteristic of t.
and redefinition of
acceptance of the revival, openness ard
contemporary trend in Marxian aesthetics. Williams'
in the theoretical development of Marxism situates him outside orthodox Marrxisrm
flexibility
to neo-Marxists and makes his contribution to British Marxist eriticism unjque and
relates him
significant.
1.4.1 Cultural Materialism

and Literatee
Raymond Williams coined the term "cultural mnaterialism" in Marxism
of
(1977). This critical term means that whatever purpose cultural practices may serve, its means
a
production are always material. He explains his new theory that he calls cultural materialism as:
theory of the specificities of material cultural and literary productionwithin historical
materialism. Its details belong to the argument as a whole, but I must say, at this point, that it
is, in my view, a Marxist theory, and indeed that in its specific fields it is, in spite of and
even because of the relative unfamiliarity of some of its elements, part of what I at least see
as the central thinking of Marxism. (Marxism and Literature 5-6)

Cultural Materialism is an analytical approach that focuses on ideology, on the role of

institutions such as film industry, publishing industry etc. in cultural practice, intellectual contexts
such as modernism, postcolonialism etc., forms such as the history of the Western novel or the
magical realism of Latin American novel- their requirements and limits, modes of production
such as printing, digital printing and mass media, organisation and regulatory mechanisns such
as legislation on copyright laws and patents, and reproduction in the form of sales, censorship.
dissemination through adaptation. reviews
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includes an analysis of the relationship among the economic. political, social and
cultural aspects
of society.

1,5 "Literature" - Summary and Analysis

The essay "Literature" is the third chapter of Williams'

seminal work Marxism and Literature (1977).This classic study Raymnd Wlliam
examines the place of literature within Marxist cultural theory. The
book is divided into three sections titled "Basic Concepts", "Cultural
Theory" and Literary Theory". The first section contains and Literature
truly patbhreaking'terrytsgeton
discussions on culture, language, literature and ideology. The
particular variation of language use that Williams is interested in,
is literature.

Raymond Williams begins the essay stating that it is difficult

to view literature as a 'concept'. Literature conventionally refers to a highly valued work defined
as full, central, immediate human experience', usually with an associated reference to 'minute
particulars'. The special property of literature' as a concept is that it claims this kind of
importance and priority in the concrete achievements of many great works. But 'society' is often
seen as essentially general and abstract, rather than the direct substance of human living. Other
related concepts such as Politics, Sociology' or Ideology', are similarly considered as mere
hardened outer shells compared with the living experience of literature.

Williams reveals the naivety ofthis familiar concept of literature in two ways -theoretically
and historically. This is a powerful and often forbidding system of abstraction, in which the
concept of literature' becomes actively ideological. Theory can do something against it, in the
necessary recognition that "literature is the process and the result of formal composition within
the social and formal properties of a language". The concept of literature as an "immediate living
experience is an extraordinary ideological feat according to Williams. This has caused the rise of
various dependent categories such as 'myth', 'romance', 'fiction', 'realist fiction', 'epic', lyric'
and 'autobiography'.
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Williams, is a shaping of the world, a transformative process b

Literature, according to
the world. Applying the theory of cultural materialism, literature caan
which the author acts upon position cannot be
whose
means of production. Literature is a social activity
be viewed as a of
superstructure. Writers work within a network pre.
validated by the concept of ideological
relation consisting of literary conventions, literary traditions and languaoe
existing social
to expose literature. He disproves the Chomskyan and Saussurean vieue
Williams therefore tries
Language is an active process of shared system of signs or symbols. He criticises
of language.
superstructural by-product of
orthodox Marxism which reduces language and literature to a
collective labour.
modern form since the
Williams traces the development of the concept of literature in its
the
Renaissance. It developed after the eighteenth century but was fully developed only by
following French
nineteenth century. The English use of the word came in the fourteenth century
alphabet", Williams savs
and Latin precedents. Its root was Latin littera, meaning "a letter of the
and formal
that "literature is the prócess and the result of formal composition within the social
properties of a language" (ML 46). Literature' the common early spelling meant ´to read' and
was close to the modern word literacy. The normal adjective associated with literature' was
literate. ln the seventeenth century, literary had meant reading ability and experience. Literature
acquired a special modernised meaning in the eighteenth century. It meant a specialisation to
reading. Previously, it had referred to a specialization out of the medieval liberal arts of rhetoric
and grammar to learnedness specifically in reading. Inthe material context of the development of
printing, literature meant the printed word and especially the book, thus leading to an alternative
definition of literature as "printed books". It never meant an "active composition" or the
"making" of poetry but was just a reading category as mentioned in the works of Bacon and
Johnson.

Wiliams states that in the eighteenth century "Literature, was a category of use and
condition rather than of production". This specialisation was certainly made in terms of social
class. In its first extended sense, beyond the bare sense of literacy', it was adefinition of 'polte
and 'humane learning' thus specifying a particular social distinction. New political concepts of
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literature. as reading in the 'classical' languages. But in its first stage, in

the eighteenth century.
literature was primarily a generalised social concept, expressing a certain
achievement.
level of educational

Literature, as a concept, has been corrupted by almost total abstraction from its
of production. to the point of being identified with conditions
works expressing immediate lived experience.
Literature, like society, economy and culture,changed in meaning in
capitalist society. Literature
was a form of learning that individuals of high social
standing could achieve. It was a skill of
reading that was a marker of a level of politeness, a social distinction.
Literature could be all
printed works, not specifically works that were labelled "fictional" or
"imaginative."
Williams talks of three complicating tendencies that arose:

First, a shift from 'learning' to "taste' or »sensibility' as a criterion

defining literary quality;
Second, an increasing specialisation of literature to 'creative' or imaginative' works and;

Third, a development of the concept of 'tradition' within national terms, resulting in the more
effective definition of 'a national literature'. (ML 48)

Williams explains each of the above three tendencies clearly. The first tendency indicated
the final stage of a shift - from a para-national scholarly profession, with its original social base in
the church, universities and the classical languages; to a profession increasingly defined by its
class position. Taste' and 'sensibility' are "bourgeoisie categories" and essentially unifying
concepts in class terms. Along wth this, 'criticism' developed as a new term from the
seventeenth century. It shifted its meaning from 'commentaries'on literature within the'leamed'
criterion, to the conscious exercise of taste', 'sensibility' and 'discrimination'. It became a
significant special forn of the general tendency in the concept of literature to an emphasis on the
use or consumption of works, rather than on their production. These forms of the concepts of
literature and criticism are in the perspective of historical and social developments, forms of a
class specialisation and controlof ageneral social practice.
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The second tendency states an increasing specialization of literature to 'oreative'

explajins thas :.
'imaginative' works. According to Williams, this process is very complicated. He
is a major affimative responsc, to the socially repressive and intellectually mechanical forms of a
new social order, especially that of industrial capitalism'. The pressures and limits of wage-
labour production of commodities and social relations to functions within a systematic economic
and political order were challenged in the name of a liberating imagination or creativity.
Literature acquired a new significance in this period. "Art' was shifted from its sense of a general
human skill to a special area, defined by imagination' and 'sensibility'.'Aesthetic' shifted from its
sense of general perception to a specialized category of the 'artistic' and the 'beautiful'. 'Fiction
and 'myth' shifted from being considered as 'fancies' or lies' and were honoured as the 'bearers
of imaginative truth'. "Romance' and 'romantic' were given newly specialised positive emphases.
The specialised meaning came to predominate around the distinguishing qualities of the
imaginative' and the 'aesthetic'.

In this process of professionalization of criticism, literature became a concept in order to

define the object of this practice, providing a stable domain where bourgeois class sensibilities
can be exercised. Soon under continuing pressure, the positive assertions became negative and
comparative resulting in some modes of literature being classified as bad writing, popular writing
and mass culture. Thus the category which had appeared objective as 'all printed books, and
which had been given a social class foundation as 'polite learning' and the domain of 'taste' and
'sensibility, now became a necessarily selective and self-defining area. Not all 'fction' was
"imaginative'; and not all ' literature' was 'Literature'. Criticism acquired importance as the only
way of validating this specialised and selective category. The narrowing of the concept of
literature to imaginative or fictional works is a response to the oppressive features of capitalist
production, which strangles human creativity. The concepts of art as a special province of human
skill defined by imagination and sensibility, aesthetics as a specialized perception of beauty and
artistic quality, and literature as the repository of fiction, seen as the bearer of "imaginative
truth," are all responses to this repression, designed to "preserve" human creativity when in
everyday practical activity it was being systemically destroyed. With these new concepts,
bourgeois criticism took as its task the discrimination between works that deserved the title
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-iterature and those which did not, based on "literary values".

anancaretly national tradition. which particularly ones originating from
defined "great works. This led to the development of the
third tendency

The third tendency indicates a

development of the concept of 'tradition' within national
S, resulting in the more effective
definition of 'a national literature'. The idea of a 'national
Perature' had been growing strongly since the Renaissance. It drew on all the
positive forces of
mulural nationalism and its real achievements. It brought with it a
sense of the 'greatness' or
'sory of the native language. National literature soon
ceased to be a history and became a
mition with selective and self-defining literary values'
asserted by criticism. Marxism has
mae littie progress in this successful categorization of literature. In this
regard even Mar chose
10 remain within the conventions and categories of his time.

The later Marxists atempted three main kinds of practical application

) an attempted assimilation of" literature' to 'ideology.
an effective and important inclusion of popular literature'- the "literature of the
people- as
a necessary but neglected part of the literary tradition';
) and a sustained but uneven attempt to relate literature' to the social
and economic history
within which it had been produced. (ML 52).

There was an effective and significant reconstitution over wide areas of historical social
practice. It positively allows new kinds of reading and new kinds of questions about 'the works
themselves. This has been known, as Marxist criticism', a radical variant of the established
bourgeois practice.

Marxist criticism' and 'Marxist literary studies' have been most successful, when they have
worked within the received category of literature. But the attempted assimilation to 'ideology'
was a disastrous failure. Williams mentions other significant contributions to Marxist criticism
and Marxist literary studies. Lukacs contributed a profound revaluation of the aesthetic. The
Frankfurt School, with its special emphasis on art, undertook a sustained re-examination of
artistic production', centred on the concept of 'mediation'. Goldmann undertook a radical
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variants of formalism undurtook radical redetinitio.

revaluation of the 'creative subjct ". Marxist
new uses of the concepts of 'signs' and 'texts', and with .
of the processes of writing. with
category.
significantly related refusal of "literature' as a
recognition of "literature' as a specializing social and
The crucial theoretical break is the
category. Just because it is historical, a key concept of a major phase of a culture, it is
historical
of language. Literature meant .
decisive evidence ofaparticular form of the socialdevelopment
and cultural relationships. There
work of outstanding and permanent importance in specific social
changes in the basic
is a profound transformation of these relationships, directly connected with
of language, which
means of production. These changes are most evident in the new technologies
have moved practice beyond the relatively uniform and specializing technology of print. The
changes Williams refers to are electronic transmission and recording of speech and of writing
for speech, and the chemical and electronic composition and transmission of images, in complex
relations with speech and with writing for speech, and including images which can themselves be
'written' . They are megns of production, developed in "direct if complex relations with
profoundly changing and extending social and cultural relationships, changes elsewhere
recognizable as deep political and economic transformations" (ML 54).

Wiliams states that in each transition there is a historical development of social language
itself. Williams advises us to see many of the active values of literature' as not tied to the
concept, but as elements of a continuing and changing practice moving beyond its old forms.
Literature has in general been assimilated to ideology, expressing aparticular lass identity. This
has had the advantage of including populår literature as something equally canonical with the
"great" works as defined by bourgeois critics, but has so far failed to mount an effective attack on
bourgeois concepts of literature, art, and aesthetics. Williams concludes that an effective Marxist
literary theory must challenge each of these
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