Abstract
This volume contributes to the continuing effort to evaluate and extend the project of Raymond Williams’s work. It is entirely appropriate that this effort has so far been characterized by a sense of having to maintain momentum1, for Williams’s writing was a ‘project’ in the strictest sense — always purposive, embodying a sense of work to be done, its value often seeming to lie in sketching future developmental possibilities or in suddenly highlighting, through a felicitous conjunction or realignment of knowledges and disciplinary procedures, new fields of enquiry into the cultural past. But also implicit in Williams’s own work is the necessity of a constant critical vigilance towards that project, and therefore an obligation to justify any re-evaluation from the emergent perspectives and demands of the present.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For example, Christopher Prendergast, in his introduction to Cultural Materialism: On Raymond Williams, ed. C. Prendergast (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), writes of the intention to ‘keep alive a body of work … by reading out from it, by at once extending and problematizing it’ p. 2.
Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 5.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1850 [1958] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), pp. 321–322; Ross, Strange Weather, p. 6.
Cornel West, ‘In Memoriam: The Legacy of Raymond Williams’, in Prendergast (ed.), Cultural Materialism, pp. ix–xii; ix.
Tony Pinkney, Raymond Williams (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1991.)
Norman Fairclough, ‘Critical discourse analysis and the marketization of public discourse: the universities’, Discourse and Society, 4:2 (1993) pp. 133–168.
R. Keat, N. Whiteley and N. Abercrombie (eds.) The Authority of the Consumer (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 13.
Fred Inglis, Raymond Williams (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).
See David Hare, ‘Cycles of Hope and Despair’, The Guardian, 3–4 June 1989, for an initial account of this episode.
Jim McGuigan, ‘Reviewing a Life. Fred Inglis’s Biography of Raymond Williams’, New Left Review, 215 (Jan./Feb. 1996), pp. 100–108. The phrase is attributed to Terry Eagleton.
Raymond Williams, The City and the World’, in What I Came To Say, eds. N. Belton, F. Mulhern and J. Taylor (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), pp. 88–89.
Ibid., p. 89.
Inglis, Raymond Williams, p. 178.
John Brenkman, ‘Raymond Williams and Marxism’, in Prendergast, ed., Cultural Materialism, pp. 237–267; 250–251.
See André Gorz (trans. Malcolm Imrie), Paths To Paradise: On The Liberation From Work (London and Sydney: Pluto Press, 1985).
For a useful survey of critiques of Gorz, and a defence of his positions, see Finn Bowring, ‘Misreading Gorz’, New Left Review 217 (May/June 1996), pp. 102–122.
Gorz, Paths to Paradise, p. 66.
Ross, Strange Weather, p. 4.
Ibid., pp. 3–4.
Raymond Williams, Towards 2000 (London: Chatto and Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1983), p. 18.
Ibid., p. 8.
Raymond Williams, ‘Writing, Speech and the “Classical”’, in What I Came To Say, pp. 44–56; 54.
Ibid., pp. 54–55.
Ibid., p. 56.
Williams, Culture and Society, pp. 318–319.
Williams, Towards 2000, pp. 146–152.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 207.
Williams, Towards 2000, pp. 28–29.
Raymond Williams, ‘Problems of Materialism’, in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), pp. 103–122.
Raymond Williams, ‘Utopia and Science Fiction’, in Problems in Materialism and Culture, pp. 196–212; 207.
Williams, Towards 2000, p. 12.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992).
Williams, Towards 2000, p. 248.
See E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Merlin Press, 1977);
Thompson’s discussion of Abensour in New Left Review 99 (1976).
Williams, Culture and Society, p. 159.
Williams, ‘Utopia and Science Fiction’, p. 204.
Ibid, p. 208.
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Glasgow: Fontana, 1976), pp. 119–120.
Williams, Towards 2000, pp. 264–265.
Williams, ‘Desire’, in What I Came To Say, p. 33.
Ibid., p. 33.
Williams, ‘Utopia and Science Fiction’, p. 205.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1997 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wallace, J., Jones, R., Nield, S. (1997). Introduction: ‘Somebody is trying to think …’. In: Wallace, J., Jones, R., Nield, S. (eds) Raymond Williams Now. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373464_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373464_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-39346-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37346-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)