Raymond Willams 

Raymond Willams 

Raymond Williams, the overlooked Marxist but an impactful figure to the study of Literature and Linguistics. When we are introduced to Karl Marx, we often times overlook how Friedrich Engles, plays a jarringly critical roles and how he has enabled Marx with the support and opportunity he needed to move with what Marx believed and simultaneously wrote about. Similarly, Williams became this figure– unless you’ve touched subjects directly under his expertise– he’s the one we’ve turned a blind eye towards. 

Keywords, by Raymond Williams, a treatise and not a dictionary where he presented us the historical transformation 109 words which have underwent as a part of socio-political, ethno-cultural and economical transcendence and haven being privileged enough to read one of his impactful works, it’s just baffling to see how less of a influence he has outside of his field. It’s not extrapolating information that is thrown at you just for the heck of it, but rather an insistence to know who and what Raymond Williams’ stands for. He has redefined/ restructured what Antonio Gramsci has called Hegemony, and even went on further with his works in tearing down era’s through his works and critiquing the existence and work of aristocrats and ownerships in his works The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence and in Culture and Society: Coleridge to Orwell with his highlights on class struggle; from his comments overarching and inclusive of architecture, fashion, food, and even leisure, he has lured literary critics. 

Williams was one of the pioneers to question about the greatness of culture, the association of High Culture to the Bourgeoise and propagated skeptically the notion of something with no inherent value to be associated and put into pedestal, a notion he worked to deconstruct by questioning the elites and it’s control over the means of production as well as its hegemonic power over what is to be named as culture, and more.

This British man, also was very actively engaging in discussion of what Language is, and how it is a reflection of society, that has been nothing short of a lopsided tale serving a particular class; he question the use of language in reality, and how it has shaped the area of Literature, and constricted it, almost white-washed it. He persists upon altering generic views towards literature, to understand categories like arts, humanity, creativity, science and more. He also spoke about the politics of Speech Writing and how narrowed or culture centric it has to be in order to act as a tool of aid to the speaker to give him impetus, this all significantly spotlights William’s need to bring Language to the forefront of the existence and continuation of human society, not as a crutch, but more like a base for the super-structure to stand tall on; not a closed, rigid system, but something that could be reimagined and conceptualised to constantly regenerates, this is Raymond Williams’ basic as a Marxist Cultural Critic.