Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williamswas a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books have sold in UK editions alone and there are many translations available. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach...
NationalityWelsh
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth31 August 1921
country cities way
A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.
country powerful land
Country' and 'city' are very powerful words, and this is not surprising when we remember how much they seem to stand for in the experience of human communities. In English, 'country' is both a nation and a part of a 'land'; 'the country' can be the whole society or its rural area. In the long history of human settlements, this connection between the land from which directly or indirectly we all get our living and the achievements of human society has been deeply known.
country powerful communication
On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.
complaint consumers establish policies procedures rights
We need to establish better complaint procedures and policies so consumers know what their rights are. They don't know what their rights are.
hope possible radical truly
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
door front kick steal tried
They tried to kick in my front door and steal my car. The gunshots went all through the night.
door front kick steal tried
They tried to kick in my front door and steal my car, ... The gunshots went all through the night.
human language opening positively
Language is, then, positively a distinctly human opening of and opening to the world: Not just a distinguishable or instrumental but a constitutive faculty.
thinking class middle
We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.
feelings gaps social
The gap between our feelings and our social observation is dangerously wide.
art independent kind
Most works of art are effectively treated as commodities and most artists, even when they justly claim quite other intentions, areeffectively treated as a category of independent craftsmen or skilled workers producing a certain kind of marginal commodity.
names intellectual needs
It wasn't idealism that made me, from the beginning, want a more secure and rational society. It was an intellectual judgment, to which I still hold. When I was young its name was socialism. We can be deflected by names. But the need was absolute, and is still absolute.
education class training
A very large part of English middle-class education is devoted to the training of servants...In so far as it is, by definition, the training of upper servants, it includes, of course, the instilling of that kind of confidence which will enable the upper servants to supervise and direct the lower servants.
ideas social process
It is not primarily ideas that have a history; it is societies. And then what often seem opposed ideas can in the end be seen as parts of a single social process.